Weight of Worlds, page 8
Six Queens had tried, and failed. Perhaps, this time, the King could use the glittering lure of a crown as a lure and a reward rather than a pre-requisite – perhaps his mistake had been marrying the women first, before he had brought them here to finish the tapestry and remove the curse. Perhaps only a woman whose head had not yet felt the weight of that crown could accomplish the task. And besides... if this one failed, as the others had failed, there would be no seventh Queen to lay beside the six who already slept the eternal sleep on the Walk of Queens. The woman who failed could be buried quietly somewhere out in an unknown corner, in an unmarked grave...
This girl’s father might not be too eager to hand her over to such a potential fate – but on the other hand, he was, by all the accounts the Minister had heard, poor enough to let her go for a small discreet purse of gold... and besides, there was always the chance, the chance, that she could do this thing, and actually become the next Queen. In which case, of course, the purse of gold would be multiplied, a thousandfold, by virtue of having his beloved daughter sit in a golden throne by the side of the King of the land. As for her not being the most appropriate of brides for a king – well – the Minister could, he found himself thinking, gild the lily as best he could during the remainder of the journey back to the White Palace, and present his King with – if not an ideal prospect – at least an opportunity.
He thought better of seeking out the tanner’s house that night, having himself imbibed more than he thought was entirely advisable and feeling distinctly light-headed with it. But he fought down an incipient hangover headache the next morning, and presented himself at a decent hour on the doorstep of the tanner’s workshop.
The man who came to the door at his knock looked promising – he appeared thin and tired, and his eyes were bloodshot and bleak. He had not had much sleep of late.
“I am looking for Geerd, the leather worker,” the Minister said, knowing full well that the man stood before him. “I come from... the King.”
That had less of an effect that the Minister had expected, or hoped for. Geerd simply nodded, wiping his hands on the sides of his trews.
“I am Geerd,” he said. “What does the King want with the likes of me?”
“Your daughter,” the Minister said.
Geerd straightened, his gaze sharpening a little. “My daughter?” he said, his voice wary. “What has my daughter to do with the King?”
“She is by reputation a skilled weaver,” the Minister said, repeating gossip he had only heard for the first time the previous night over beer in a voice of such conviction and authority that Geerd actually stepped back in the face of it. “As even you will know, there is a tapestry in the heart of the White Palace that desperately needs to be completed...”
“Yes,” Geerd said. “I know. I also know that every hand that was laid to the task belongs to a dead woman. What, the King has run out of Princesses and grand ladies to marry, that now he needs to kill my child?”
“If she succeeds, he will make her Queen,” the Minister said.
“They were all Queens, before they began, all the ones who died,” Geerd said. “And they are all just as dead.”
“I am authorized to offer you this,” the Minister said, hefting a small leather purse in the palm of his hand. He was, of course, authorized to do no such thing – but he had every hope of this small investment bearing rich dividends if his scheme came to fruition. “If the girl comes with me, today.”
“My last apprentice left me, four days ago,” Geerd said. “My wife has been dead these ten years. My younger daughter is sick, and like as not will not live to see the next summer. This shop... and Antje... are all that I have. I do not believe that you can offer me enough gold to sell my...”
“Papa,” said a clear high voice from inside the shop. “With the gold you can hire another apprentice, buy medicine for Caja. I will go to the King.”
“Anouk... my Antje...”
“I am a good weaver, Papa.” Apparently she had been listening in to the conversation, from within. She had heard enough.
“So were they, the others, the rest. The Queens. I cannot send you to your death...”
“You are not sending me, Papa. I choose to go.”
She came out of the house as she spoke, into the Minister’s sight. He gave her a long apprising look and hid a small sigh – he had not been far wrong. The girl was tall, rangy, almost bony; her hands were long-fingered and well enough shaped but perhaps a little on the large side, and raw from the work she had been doing in the house and in the tanner’s shop; her ankles were thin, red from the cold, and her bare feet were thrust into a pair of wooden clogs. She wore a none-too-clean white cap on her head, and from underneath it a few strands of lanky hair of a non-descript color escaped to fall over her face. She had a somewhat prominent nose, and direct blue eyes – she would have to be taught not to hold and challenge a man’s gaze like she was doing right at that moment, before she was presented to the King.
It was Anouk who reached out and plucked the purse from the Minister’s hand, and closed her own father’s hands around it. As she was doing so, she leaned in and kissed him lightly on one weathered cheek. Her only gesture of farewell. She hesitated for just a moment, as though she was considering going back in to take her leave of her sick younger sister, but appeared to decide against it, and turned to the Minister instead.
“I am ready,” she said simply.
The Minister found himself a little disconcerted, but this was what he had come for, after all – at least he would not return to the Palace empty-handed. He nodded at Geerd, and turned on his heel to walk away. Anouk followed.
“We had better,” he muttered unwillingly, without glancing back but very aware of her appearance at his back, “find you some halfway appropriate clothes.”
He handed the girl over to the wife of the innkeeper when he returned to the hostelry, giving the woman the rest of that day and that night to make the girl remotely presentable. He was planning to leave early the next morning.
It took him a moment to recognise Anouk when he emerged into the courtyard of the hostelry in the grey light of the morning after. She was still wearing her wooden clogs but she had been given a pair of clean worsted stockings which he caught a glimpse of underneath the hem of a not entirely new but clean and well-made dress which might have belonged to the innkeeper’s wife herself. The cap had vanished, and her hair had been braided into a neat crown about her head – it must have been washed, perhaps with chamomile, because it seemed blonder than the minister thought it had been the day before. She was still as long-limbed and angular as a young colt, but that could not be helped – and the new dress did seem to give a hint of the fact that with the right seamstress a womanly figure could well emerge from underneath the shapeless garments she wore. She met the Minister’s gaze squarely, with full understanding; her hands were folded together against her ribcage with a strange serenity as she waited for him to more or speak.
When he finally did, it was brief.
“You clean up into a passable package,” he said brusquely. “Come. We should be on our way.”
The Minister wondered how the others had fared, his colleagues sent out in other directions to find the King a new wife. When he and Anouk arrived at the White Palace he sent her into a quiet anteroom to wait, with a footman on duty at the door just in case she should decide to bolt after all, and went to speak to the King alone; he was not away for long, and when he came back it was to crook a finger at Anouk, who had been quietly sitting on a chair upholstered in dark brocade, to follow him.
They crossed empty halls, passed along colonnades flanking cold winter courtyards, and finally climbed a long, endless, winding stair. Right at the top, a single door opened off a small landing. The Minister turned a large iron key which stood in the door, and pushed it open, gesturing for Anouk to go inside. She obeyed, and found herself in an eyrie. The room was many-sided, and every side had a window, and the windows looked out over the Palace, and the grounds, and out into the countryside. A long way away to the horizon a line of blue mountains was visible against the sky; in another direction, there was the hint of water as the light reflected off the lake to the south of the Palace; another view showed a wide and dense wood, partly bare of foliage now that it was winter but enough of it evergreen to give a sense of its depth and scope.
The inside walls of the room, in between the windows, were gilded – and shone with a soft golden glow.
“Oh,” Anouk breathed. “How beautiful.”
“Never mind that,” the Minister said. “Look, here – this is all you need to pay attention to.”
Anouk brought her gaze back to the center of the room where a loom was set up, a half-finished tapestry upon it. At its foot was a basket containing a pile of yarn; in front of it, a small three-legged stool.
“This is what my lord the King bade me tell you,” the Minister said. “Your task, which begins right now, is to weave that tapestry until it is done. You have seven days to accomplish this. You will see nobody from the moment you set your hand to the loom to the moment those seven days are up and the King himself will climb up here to inspect your work. If you succeed, you will be wed to the King the very next morning, and become the Queen of the land. If you do not succeed...” He did not finish. He did not have to. Anouk already well knew the price of failure. Six Queens lay in their graves, somewhere in the gardens below – six Queens who had paid the price of failure.
She realised that a part of her should be afraid, but somehow she could not quite seem to summon up fear.
“What is the tapestry’s design?” she asked, instead. “How am I supposed to finish something of whose final form I have been given no hints?”
“The tapestry knows,” said the Minister. “It needs a woman’s hand, to weave – but the design is already within it. Because the word is... that when it is done it will hold the true name of the demon who is the canker at the root of this realm – and once we call him by that true name, he will be vanquished, and he will be gone forever. Show some sense, girl. If we already knew that name, then we would not need the tapestry. That is why you are here. To find this secret out.”
“But how will I know...” the practical Anouk began, but the Minister raised his hand for silence.
“Enough,” he said. “It is done. Your seven days have begun.”
He hesitated, as though he considered wishing her luck – but decided against it. Instead, he gave her a small sharp bow, and backed out of the room, closing the door behind him. Anouk heard the key turn in the lock. She was alone with the magic, alone what felt as though it was the heart of the kingdom; she felt as though this room had been designed for the single purpose as to allow somebody who loved this land to come up here and gaze out and see every hidden nook and cranny of it all, water and wood, hill and dale, village and town...
The light was starting to fade, the views vanishing into shadows and twilight, and she finally investigated the rest of the room she had been locked into. She discovered that she had a lamp, and a supply of oil – and she lit it, and hung it from a hook set beside the door. The lamp was a small one and looked barely adequate, but the golden walls picked up the light and reflected it, and the room was suffused with a soft, bright glow. The only other things in the room, aside from the loom and the skeins of yarn and the three-legged stool, were a thin straw pallet and a woolen blanket folded upon it. None of the windows had glass or coverings upon them, and this room looked as though it got cold enough on winter nights to freeze the marrow in a living being; the blanket looked woefully inadequate against this. But oddly enough, Anouk was not cold. She completed the circuit of the room to find nothing more than another tiny door that opened into what looked to be a privy. That was all.
She crossed to the loom and inspected the tapestry. It showed no obvious pattern or design that she could immediately discern, nothing that she could use as a starting point to continuing where it had been left off, but there was a thread still attached which looked as though it had been abandoned mid-weft – and she sat down and reached for it.
It seemed to... vibrate... gently underneath her hand. As though... it was breathing.
Anouk gentled it, whispering softly to it as she might have whispered to her feverish little sister, soothing, gentling. Before long the whisper had turned into a soft tune, into something almost like a lullaby. And somewhere underneath it all she sensed the others who had been here, the restless ghosts of the dead Queens. Their presence. Their frustration. Their... their fear.
She heard their names, shivering like a breath of wind through dry autumn leaves. The names carved under the statues on the Walk of Queens. – five, and a sixth yet to rise.
Gisela. Hedwych. Katryn. Mirthe. Stefana. Viona.
Her hands found a rhythm. Beneath her fingers, the threads wove together, knit, began to find a pattern born in her soft, hummed lullaby.
Why did they die? How did they die...?
“They were easily distracted...”
A voice, from nowhere, as if in answer to her question. Anouk kept her eyes on her work, kept on humming.
“...are you easily distracted...?”
Anouk did not respond.
“...are you afraid...?”
“No,” Anouk said softly, “I am not afraid.”
“You will be,” the voice said, and she almost felt lips moving against her ear, the words poured into its shell like secrets.
“What is your name?” Anouk asked.
“That is what they brought you here to find,” the voice said. “When you have finished the tapestry, you will know.”
“And I will finish it,” Anouk said.
“Then you will have to work without stopping,” the voice said. “Because let me tell you the rest of the story, the part that they tell none of the Queens before they are brought here. I am under a geas to stop you from completing this task, at any cost. What they did not tell you that whatever work you do on that tapestry, I will begin to unravel, the moment your hand leaves the thread. As fast as you do, I will undo. And when they come for you at the end of your seven days... you will die. As all of the others died before you.”
Gisela. Hedwych. Katryn. Mirthe. Stefana. Viona.
Anouk bent her head, and focused on her hands, on their steady, constant motion. And all the while the whispering voice was all around her, wrapping itself around her fingers until it took a conscious effort to move them, tangling in her hair, echoing in her mind. There was nothing coherent about the stories that it told, and it seemed to trip easily between one dead Queen and the next, but it told of them all – about all the women who had come here to find out the name of the spirit who haunted this place, and died trying. One of the Queens had been driven mad by that voice, apparently, and had jumped from the high windows to her death. At least two of the others had been found here sitting quiet and idle and quite mad before the half-unravelled tapestry, with no trace left that they had done any work on it at all, and had died quietly before the sun had set on the day after they had been taken from this room.
“I showed myself to all of them, in the end,” the voice said, whispered, hinted, quietly threatened. “And when I did they all went mad. Every Queen. And then they died.”
“I am not a Queen,” Anouk said.
She had glanced up and out of the windows, every so often, at the beginning. After a while, she stopped doing that. She lost track of time. All that existed was the tapestry, and the prophecy – and the more she worked, the more the tapestry revealed, and the more she understood. And the greater her pity grew, because she understood more than any of the other women had done; she had got furthest in, had seen the pattern almost complete.
“He stole my skin... he stole my love... he stole my life... and thought I was done,” the voice said into Anouk’s ear.
“Who did?” she asked quietly, her hands working the loom. She had not slept, had not eaten, in she could not remember how long. Her fingernails were ragged, her fingertips raw and bloody, leaving small smears of her blood on the tapestry.
“A war of mages. A war of mages. And Gisela paid the price first because she did not understand – ah, she, she made me – and I...”
The first of the Queens. The one who had jumped, apparently. The one who did know too much.
“What happens,” Anouk asked, “if I find the true name?”
“Then I am free,” the voice whispered.
“So why then are you killing the women who were sent here to complete this tapestry? If you had allowed them to complete their work – any one of them – you could have been free a long time ago.”
“I set up the tapestry. It was to be my key, my release. But then he set the doom upon me, that I must unravel every night the work that was put in during the day. A war of mages.”
“Who is he, then? And who are you?”
“I... I am.... I am the King...” the voice was barely there now, just an echo in her mind. “And he is... he is... he is...”
“His is the name which is revealed by this tapestry, is it not...?” Anouk said, her own voice dropping into a whisper.
She was close. So close. The tapestry was almost done. The basket of yarn was almost empty. The sun had risen and set several times, she was aware of that, but had lost count of how many. Soon, now, they would come for her. Soon.
“It is a skin,” the voice inside her head said, softly, softly. “It is a skin. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” said the tanner’s daughter, who had seen many skins stripped from the bodies which they had contained. Who was not a gently-reared maiden, nor yet a Queen. “I understand.”
“Then see,” the voice said. “Look, and see.”
