Metro Winds (26 page)

Last winter I caught pneumonia. I remember little of the illness except the way the light cut into my eyes, igniting a headache so astoundingly painful that it made me feel as if my head would explode. You can always tell a mortal who has dwelt here too many seasons, for they breathe as if the sea has entered into their lungs.

I remember the chilly delicacy of the air as it settled on me the first time I came here, how my skin rose into gooseflesh. Now it prickles at the memory. Or maybe a goose walks on my grave, for I suppose there must be a grave, somewhere in the future, waiting to receive me.

Disliking the tenor of my thoughts, I stop at a window on the side of the palace that overlooks the city and the canal rather than its sprawling grounds. I run my eyes over the ruddy carapace formed by the roofs below. Only a myriad of dark lanes and the glimmering threads of smaller canals show through it, except where the carapace splits wide open to allow the Grand Canal to pass between this palace and the one on the opposite bank. Between them, the gleaming silver surface of the water is ruffled with white and a cold wind slaps at me.

I feel Cloud-Marie's warmth as she comes to stand beside me. She grunts softly but I lift a finger to quell her, for underneath the ebb and flow of my thoughts, I am still listening.

Did I imagine the howl? Such an imagining would require hope to give it force. The knowledge that I might still be capable of hope forces me to hope and, like a man made to walk on long-withered limbs, I stumble a few astonished steps, then fall. Because even if he howled, what salvation can there be for him?

‘It's not possible,' I say, speaking aloud without meaning to.

The dry croak of my voice startles me and, continuing along the passage, I discover that I cannot remember when last I spoke. I have not been out in many weeks. No one comes to visit, of course; they would as soon enter Dracula's castle. I can guess that thorny rumours and barbed stories have grown around this palace and its inhabitants in a great wild thicket. If I were younger, they would make me a trapped princess and dream a prince to rescue me, but I am a queen and the prince is a king.

My husband did not change at all after he became a king. Of course, his kind can be any age once they have reached maturity, simply by willing it. Naturally enough he chose to be a young man in his prime most often, except occasionally as a whim when he fancied that wisdom is more compelling when it issues from withered greybeards.

Perhaps he takes that form now, or maybe he has grown weary of the demands of manhood and has made himself into a boy. I do not know, for he has gone a-questing these long years, and even before that, he left me and took to residing in the Queen's Palace, often called the Summer Palace because it is always summer there.

When first he announced that he would go and live there, he used the weather as an excuse, telling me he preferred summer to the eternal autumn shrouding the King's Palace. Ironically, it is the queen whose moods dictate the weather above the King's Palace, but she can control it only so far as she can control her moods. Yet though my moods wrought stormy squalls and chilly rain, I do not believe he left me because of the weather.

The Queen's Palace is prettier than the King's Palace, and stands on the opposite bank of the great canal from it, being a rambling building of pale pink stone with a multitude of balconies and airy flying buttresses. A small, elaborately designed park surrounds it, full of complex and, to me, disturbingly lifelike topiary. Vast flowerbeds are laid out around the leafy beasts in geometric designs of abstract flowers that play sly tricks on your eyes. I have sometimes heard The Queen's Palace referred to as the Palace of Tears, for this is where queens must go when their sons take wives.

She is not dead, of course,
his
mother, my mother-in-law. She dwells even now in the Queen's Palace with all of the other mothers-in-law, though not her great-great-grandmother-in-law, who was human like me, and mortal. What a torture she must have found it to grow old and die among these evergreen faerie queens. But they were kind to her after their own fashion, for my husband told me once that they made themselves age with her, until she died.

So, my husband went to dwell with his mother and all those grandmothers, and for a time he played the prodigal son for them. In those days, the Summer Palace scintillated with unexpected life and self-importance and no one would have dreamed of calling it the Palace of Tears, for its halls rang with music and merriment. The queens adored my husband for the brightness he brought with him, and no doubt he dallied with some of them. Faerie folk are sensuous and there is no such thing as incest for them. They are monogamous only when they are in love. Love, for them, cannot be what it is for mortals, since love for us is mortal and therefore intensified with a bittersweet despair. Immortal love is something entirely different after the first heat; it is a slow relishing, a cool playfulness, an endless game of chess. Desire, too, is different for my husband's kind, for there is no real urgency to have anything, no sense that time is running out. It was only when my husband went to live in the Queen's Palace that I came to truly understand the nature of the difference between human and faerie desire.

My husband would summon me to the Summer Palace to attend sumptuous balls. He would not deliver the invitation himself, but send his courtiers got up as faerie godmothers or as cats in boots to deliver his invitations. His messengers would produce astonishing gowns, golden coaches and glass slippers and various spells or tests. One way or another I would be got to the ball. Once I arrived, my husband would claim me lavishly and there would be music and food and wine and dancing. For a little while I was amused if somewhat puzzled by these games, but I was no immortal who could play back and forwards in time eternally. I was a mother, and motherhood more than anything had shown me that time was not a playground but a stern and inexorable master. I became impatient with the games, yet still I went when he sent for me because I was a woman ripe in her life, and for me, that ripeness was not eternal.

My mortal desire transformed the virginal vestments the king had sent me to wear into provocative wisps of silk that barely contained me; they did not prettify or tame. Impatient desire was like a tiger within me, and sometimes my husband would gasp at the sight of me, as he had not done at that pale younger self. Then he would take me into his arms, whirl me into the dance and cover me with kisses as light and cold and insubstantial as snowflakes. But I was no longer a coy girl-woman needing his guidance and faerie tales to help me find the treasure-trove of my own passion. I would pull him with me away from the faerie lanterns and music and into the nearest dark room where we would couple, clasped together as tightly as the two hands of a single man. But the hands belonged to a drowning man, and despite passion, we would go on drowning.

I wonder now if the savagery of my ripe desire revealed in those encounters alarmed my faerie husband. My full woman's passion was not the sweet, confused yearning of a princess, nor was it the ethereal and airy passion of the immortals who know that they have all the time in the world for pleasure. There were peaks and chasms in my desires yet untouched and I felt an urgency that only mortals can feel in striving for them, knowing they will die. I know my husband desired me, fascinated by the combination of hunger and desperation that is mortal loving, yet when he held me, I think there were times when he looked into my face and beheld a corpse.

Coming into my chamber, I cross to the fire and lower myself with a sigh into the deep, comfortable bucket chair that sits before it. For a time, I let myself be hypnotised by the play of the flames on the hearth, but the howl I heard seems to be echoing in my mind.

Cloud-Marie, seeing me shiver despite the fire, drapes a warm shawl solicitously over my legs. Then she begins to unbraid the dark golden syrup of my tresses and it comes to me as a chill foreseeing that, when I am old, she will do the same thing – lay the soft rug over my skinny shanks before unwinding my coarse grey braids.

She begins to brush my hair rhythmically, and I relax into the pull and tug of her ministrations. I watch her in the mirror, seeing how her whole simple wit is focused on grooming my hair. I consider speaking to her but words make her uneasy, and they are unnecessary anyway because she is gifted with a doglike ability to sniff out my moods. Even the signing is something that she understands and yet never uses. There is no need. She responds happily and devotedly to orders that ask nothing of her but simple obedience. They make her feel safe and she is centred by them.

I have drifted half to sleep when suddenly I sit bolt upright, for it has come to me that the last person I spoke to was my son. A chill runs through me to think it could be so, for the boy ceased to speak over two years ago. Can it really be so long? It seems to me that I have had conversations recently but I cannot recall the details of them. Perhaps they are only memories of speaking long ago.

There were so many conversations when I first came here. Everyone wanted to speak with me and hear my voice. But those same eager supplicants would turn from me now, and my face, once praised for its clever beauty, is regarded as the unlucky loveliness of a mask worn by false hope, to deceive fools.

My son's loss of words was not a complete and sudden binding of his tongue. At first he lost a word here and there and I put it down to the coarsening carelessness of manhood. But his language continued to diminish and anxiety began to prod at me. I noted how he would pause a little too long when searching his mind for the word he wanted, and then he would give an irritated shake of his head and choose another. It would be a good choice, and perhaps I would not have noticed the hesitation if language and my love of it in all forms had not been the gift I chose to bestow upon him, a gift that had seemed to delight him above all the faerie gifts and enchantments he received. I read books to him and spoke of them and made him speak of them to me. I made him strive for precision when he wanted to tell me things; I demanded beauty, originality, wit. It was not long before he was my master and it was bittersweet to see him clench his teeth at some awkward description of mine, or at a word used in a careless way.

I decided that the diminishing of my son's language must be some magical affliction; illnesses and plagues here are strange and unpredictable. Sometimes there are tempests of sorrow, which affect every creature and produce a monsoon of tears. At other times, great fat frogs rain from the sky. Once there was a sleeping sickness and everyone fell where they were and slept for days. How odd it had felt to be walking through a sleeping world suffused with the mysterious reek of red roses. Of course I was immune to the illnesses of my husband's kind, just as he could not catch cold from me. But our son was a halfling and prey to the illnesses and strife of both worlds.

The loss of language went on until my son found he could no longer produce alternatives. He soon became frustrated enough to substitute the odd curse or to shrug lumpishly when a phrase eluded him. His brilliance was declining with the loss of his ability to express it. Even his demeanour lost its fineness. The daintiness of manners that had so delighted me degenerated into rough sprawling movements.

Eventually he came to shout and curse his frustration at me, he who had never raised his voice, for what need had he to do so when his words were soft scalpels that could inflict deadly hurts if he chose to use them as weapons? I longed to help him, but my desperate patience only maddened him by forcing him to acknowledge what he was becoming. When I tried to speak of it he would snarl at me to hold my tongue and lumber away.

I prayed that his intelligence and emotions were only locked up inside him and not extinguished altogether. I had to believe that, but I was becoming frightened. I set aside my pride and called for my husband, using the fragrant summoning mist he had given me in a cut diamond vaporiser. He did not come at once, and so I sent Cloud-Marie to the Summer Palace with a note for the queen-mother asking her to send my husband to me. She sent back that he was away on a quest but she had used her own magic to communicate with him. He would come as soon as he was able.

I will never forgive him for that delay. As it transpired, he could have done nothing, but he might have helped me to bear the weight of my terror. While I waited for him, I ransacked the fusty King's Palace archives, poring over tomes and seeking some clue to my son's affliction, longing for Yssa to comfort me, but my friend and companion had left the palace before I gave birth. I was desperate as a tigress to find a cure for my son, prepared to slay dragons and tear out the tongues of peacocks.

I found nothing.