Chapter Thirty A Peculiar Gargoyle Upon a Hill
CHAPTER THIRTY
A PECULIAR GARGOYLE UPON A HILL
On a cloudless day at the end of summer, I sat on the stone wall high upon the tor and looked out over Traum. I could see miles of sprawling hills, and when the wind caught my hair, I perked my ear to it. A voice was calling. A moment later, I saw her.
A young woman in a gold crown, wandering up the road.
Daylight filtered through branches and leaves and fell on her armor in bright speckles. Her gait was comfortable—she was in no hurry. As she walked she whistled a minor tune, then began to sing.
“A colorful dream, the bright land of Traum, where the wind on the moors hums a tune. Where the holloways lead you awry and along, and the thrifts are always in bloom. The water is sweet and the sprites are so fair, and the fields all blankets of brome. How many have wondered and wandered out there, and determined ne’er to go home?
“But wherever you ramble, from woodland to sea, pray stop by the spring on the hill. There, Bartholomew Delling did once beckon me, and his secrets, like wine, he did spill.”
I rose to my feet. Flexed my bare toes over ancient stones. “She’s here,” I called over my shoulder.
A minute later, a batlike gargoyle appeared at the bottom of the wall. “Bartholomew?”
“The king has come. Where’s Rory?”
“Here.”
Rory weaved through the row of seedling apple trees.
His hair had grown long, tied haphazardly by a strip of leather.
When he put his hand up to tuck an errant strand behind his ear, his three gold bands caught in the light.
They looked even brighter now that the right side of his face was speckled with limestone.
Rory rolled his shoulders. Bounced on his toes. “About time.”
I slapped my hands against the wall and lowered myself down to the ground, where I bent, searching the grass until I’d plucked three perfect blades. “All right, boys. Short straw to Divine.”
The gargoyle clapped. “Oh, I hope I get it this time!”
He got it every time. Rory and I cheated to make it so.
When he got it again, the gargoyle was in such a delighted tizzy he stepped on three shale sprites, basking in the sun. He ran to the spring, sitting on its lip, and flicked a regal finger at Rory and me. “Bring the subject forth.”
“She looked young,” I told Rory sternly as we walked to the old iron gate. “Be good.”
He caught my hand. Kissed my palm—then nipped it. “I’m always good.” A minute later, he was hiding behind the wall near the gate. “Tell me,” he called in a deep voice, “who comes to hear the tale of Bartholomew Delling?”
Slowly, the woman came.
Rory jumped from behind the wall, frightened the poor soul so much she yelped.
“From which hamlet do you hail?” Rory asked, holding back a smile as the young woman collected herself.
She steadied her crown. “Coulson Faire.”
“The fair Faire,” Rory said, nodding in appreciation.
“The fair Faire!” cried the gargoyle in the distance.
“Folk of the Faire like to bring us gifts.” Rory leaned forward in a slouch. “What wares have you? What token of payment?”
The king reached into her pocket. “What manner of payment would you like?”
“Your name will do.”
“Oh.” The young woman flushed. “I’m the fourth king since the Quake. You must be the knave.”
“We deal in familiarities here. I’m Rory. The gargoyle, you know, is Bartholomew Delling.” His gaze lifted, a smile teasing his lips. “That beauty over there is Sybil.”
I came up from behind the wall, and the king yelped again.
All this time later and folk were still amazed to see me in a breastplate and not a white robe.
I leaned down. Plucked a gowan flower from the tor, then handed it to the king.
My limestone fingers grazed her skin. “What name would you give?” I asked her.
“I’m August Roane. I was chosen by the nobles for my”—she scratched her head—“well, they called it inquisitive spirit, which is a vague way of saying they appreciate the research I’ve conducted on sprites and contributed to the Seacht libraries.”
“A scholar king.” Rory wiggled his eyebrows at me. “Haven’t had one of those in a while.”
“The fact that my family is wealthy likely didn’t hurt the selection process.”
“Aaand there it is,” Rory said, smiling wryly. “You’ve come for a Divination, I suspect.”
The young woman nodded. “To hear history from those who lived it is a strange, wondrous thing.” She reached into her satchel and retrieved a notebook. An inkwell with a stone stopper. A quill. “Do you mind if I write it down?”
“Not at all.” I opened my palms. A beckoning. “You’d better come in.”
The gargoyle greeted the king as he greeted every visitor who came to the tor. With a smile.
The young king took a seat upon bromegrass, readied her writing tool, and the gargoyle drew in a deep breath.
“You know this story, Bartholomew, though you do not know all of it. I’ll tell it to you as best I can and promise to be honest in my talebearing.
If I’m not, that would be all right. A story is a kind of spectacle, I think.
A strange, shimmering display. How you look at it determines its meaning—it is not for me to say if belief inspired by spectacle should be counted as honest.”
“I think,” Rory said, leaning up against the wall, several hummingbird sprites landing in his hair, “a story is like the moon. Every night, she is a little different, but ever beautiful, and ever to remain.”
Another sprite soared above me, dropping its shadow upon the tor. “I think,” I said, grinning, “that a story is a kind of gargoyle. A multifaceted body, hewn facts and falsehoods—and made stronger for it.”
“Pray,” the gargoyle sputtered, “who is telling the story? Hmm?”
I put my hands up in mock surrender and went to stand by Rory. We’d heard the story hundreds of times, and yet it was never twice the same. Decades had passed well that way, with sameness and newness together.
The gargoyle began.
“Once, a creature lay naked upon fields of bromegrass, and the world grew around her. Her mind was full of knowledge, her limbs swollen with strength, her heart beating a contented rhythm.”
He went on, telling the king about Der ewige Mond, of sprites and the land of Traum before it had been cast into five hamlets. He told of who he was, of the boy who became the first Diviner, and then the first gargoyle, and now the first gargoyle remade.
His craggy voice moved high and low, firm then soft, depending on what part he was in.
He told the story of the abbess, then the Omens.
Soon, he entered my lifetime. How valiant he made it sound, us taking up the mantle, how sweeping the romance between Rory and me—so much so that when the king looked back at us, Rory pulled me in for a kiss, making me laugh and the young king flush and the gargoyle bat his eyes and murmur, “Dreamy.”
He told of Aisling’s demise—that it had not been sprites who destroyed the cathedral like was once thought. The young king’s eyes widened, like she could not fathom how such a formidable structure had yielded to a knight, a knave, a Diviner, a gargoyle, and a king.
He told of Benji. Of his boyish quality.
His hunger for power turning to something dark.
He told of the great quake, of Der ewige Mond, calling out after so long in the dark, and of the sprites, who did not trade in names and still never forgot their fallen companion upon the tor, who came to her aid.
He told of the tournament that changed everything. Even minds.
The king scribbled in her notebook, and the gargoyle went on.
“Benedict Castor the Third was buried like his grandfather had been—in the earth upon the tor. King Maude Bauer met death that a sprite might live, and she, who had been king only a day, did more to rewrite the story of Traum than any bearer of the crown before her. Songs of her death were sung, their tenor changing the fabric of the kingdom like an insect metamorphoses in a silken tomb. Slowly, then all at once, the heinous acts of cowardice, hunting and hurting sprites, were no more.”
He sighed, looking out over the horizon.
“We wrapped her in the finest of silks and carried her body back to the Chiming Wood, where we lay her down in the grass near her family home. A circle of foresters stood around her, dropping handfuls of birch seeds that fell upon her grave. There, new trees took root, and an entire forest of birch trees, a home to all sprites, all folk, was born of one indefatigable woman.”
I took Rory’s hand and he nodded. That part of the story was our favorite.
“In the end,” the gargoyle said, “it was not about ridding folk of their gods or sponging them of belief. The Omens were never forgotten; their banners still fly today. And while there are folk aplenty who look and listen for portents, for signs, there are those who see coin, ink, oar, chime, and loom stone and think only of their own crafts, for it was coin, knowledge, strength, intuition, and love that got folk through the perils of the great Quake. Those objects are no longer symbols of Divinity, of gods or dreams, but of resilience and the unflagging faith—”
He sighed contentedly. “That things can be better than they’ve been.”
The earth trembled. A pair of mountain sprites and their young shoat were passing by.
“And now you know,” the gargoyle told the king, “how wont history is to repeat itself in the Stonewater Kingdom. In any kingdom, I imagine. We must, like a sprite, remember, lest history be buried in stone. But take heart: There are firsts of their kind in any kingdom, too.”
He grinned at Rory, at me. “We three are evidence of that. And besides, there are times, I think, when it is all right to do the same thing over and over. To know someone, to care for them and remember them well, despite hardship or despair, is a kind of history we ought to repeat. To be generous with compassion, sparing with violence, and when the light shines upon us, to never, ever look a mouth horse in the gift.”
I smiled and did not correct him.
The gargoyle paused like he often did while pondering.
“To know the world is, in some part, to mourn it, and to live after death… Now that is strange magic, and an even stranger fate. And while we don’t all get our second chances and life often proves a battle, I have wondered and pondered, and now I am certain: My story is the same as all of Traum’s.
I would never have truly lived if, first, I had not died.
Death, after all, is its own kind of rebirth. ”
The young king peered over her shoulder at Rory and me. “What of your own deaths? Will you live on, drinking from the spring, slowly turning to stone?”
“We will live,” Rory said plainly, “until Traum no longer has need of our craft. We will tell the story. Mind the tor. Keep the sprites who come here safe. We’ve always kept them safe.”
I turned my gaze over gowan flowers and onto the horizon and felt time fall away.
I was just a girl, standing with the people I loved, looking out onto the world with wonderment.
“Eventually,” I murmured, “all three of us will succumb to time. One day, we will turn to stone. Fissure, falter, fade away.”
“But you will not be gone.” The king tapped her notebook. It was already half full with scribbles. “I’ll make sure of it.”
Rory laced his fingers in mine. I felt the smoothness of limestone, and the tiny cracks therein.
We’d talked about it many times. How one day, we would be as that great cathedral was.
Nothing but dust. And when we did go, having known coin, knowledge, strength, pain, intuition, love, heartbreak—life and death—our ending would come here upon the tor, where stories lived on.
Where death was not surrender.
The king turned to a blank page and held her quill at the ready. I wondered which tale of her new kingdom she’d ask for next. The one when the Diviner went toe to toe with the Ardent Oarsman in the Fervent Peaks? The foundling boy who defied all odds and became a knight, then a knave?
No.
She turned to the gargoyle and asked him the same question the last king had asked, and the next one undoubtedly would, too. “Why do you call everyone Bartholomew?”
Oh. He was happy. His fingers had begun to trill.
“Once, the name Bartholomew meant very little. But time has a way of circling back to itself—with little alterations, of course. I like to think now that the name Bartholomew is like you or me; its worth is yet to be defined, and thusly full of promise.” He smiled, his fang peeking out from behind his lips. “I like to give it away. After all…”
He looked up at Rory and me and the world beyond us, ending as he began and beginning as he ended. A strange little boy, telling a story upon the tor. “Every day is a new flower, a second chance—a rebirth—when you are Bartholomew.”