The feast blazes in the alleys and closes and on the high street, too, there is food enough for all and sandwiches in the morning. Here and there among the quilted blankets burns paraffin-soaked effigies of the Patron Saint of Man Civilized, woven in crosshatches of black barley and white gentian, crowned in geometric sulfur crystal, and his eyes, repeated up and down the boulevards like a stutter in the long poem of of autumn, are always knobs of old brown bone. All down the public ways work-wizened grandafathers tell the tale as it was put down by Cinquefoil the Rhymer in the age between bronze hammers and iron, of how, before either of those could be imagined to hide in the earth, when the people were mute and stupid and more kin to the insects than to the angels, a man came among them as tall as the morning, with the head of a camel, the wings of a dragon, and the legs of a draft horse, and taught them all things which could be made and not birthed, which he called by the name of technology and by the name of civilization, and this was St. Gremory. He helped them to gather the Thirteen Treasures of the Common Man, he taught them to decorate themselves with stones, he taught them fire and cookery and how to safeguard against plagues of earthquakes, he taught them agriculture and the founding of cities, he taught them to enjoy the company of others, to ferment vegetation and to devise games. And in exchange for all of this, for modernity entire, St. Gremory asked simply that a few certain laws be obeyed, and even that only for a term of seven hundred years, until he returned among their number to see what they had made of themselves.
The first commandment of St. Gremory, the only one most people cared much about, was this: “This world is yours to use, to consume and to devour and to delight in. Seize it, take what you will from it and of it, and like the maggot upon the carcass, know no part of guilt. All things great and small are yours to command, and it is a sin to waste their value. Go forth and exhaust this universe, wring from it every last seep of strength which is yours by right, and you will know the weight of blessings. But if I return to find one stone unmolested, unknown, unhollowed, my displeasure will be the fission of atoms.”
When the hundred and eleven clocks in Grisaille Spire chime eleven minutes after one in the morning, the moment when St. Gremory descended his mountain stair and began the tocking of history, the people of Tizenkét will let out a great wail and cry and drive their chisels and their knives and their spiles and their corkscrews into the black cobblestones with all their strength, prying up flakes and shards and chunks of stone, cramming them into their mouths like soft, fatty meat, grinning in holy transport as the dust runs down their chins like juice, and in her hunger and her satiation, Gablet the Fool will see at last that the midwife’s daughter Oriel had hoarded beauty in her left profile and not her right, just as he had hoarded his small coins in his cellar and not his purse.
Seven hundred years has long come and gone in Tizenkét.
Virgin
The childhood of Vnuk was a hall of strange turnings, and to the right was always the wildness of the little furred boar, and to the left was always the illness of the orphaned lamb. The monstrous children of the nobility ran rude and unruled through the palace, accepting no governance for themselves but a kindly anarchy. They tumbled through the grounds as they would have through the unfenced lands of their fathers, climbing through windows like manor doors, down passageways like rows of turnips planted for fall, up and down stairs like larch trees, stumbling into servants’ quarters as into the fields of tenant farmers, hunting tomcats and kitchen rats and speckled doves down the arcades and courtyards with the solemnity they would have given to the stalking of stags in the shaded parks of their inheritances. To them, the palace was the world and the world was the palace. They did not even dream of those grand estates their parents abandoned for the safety of the king’s eye on them. Yet the whole arrangement was so scaled to life that if you set down any boy or girl of that time on the thick seedy grass of the homes they’d never seen, they would have known exactly how many steps to get to this neighbor or that, for they were represented by the number of portraits between one bank of rooms and the next, exactly how the stables stood, and the mills, and the vineyards, for statues of cows, horses, wheat, and grapes in enamel and glass marked these spots along the royal mazeways, the directions of the brooks and streams and the names of all the creatures inside them, for these were painted along the floors, and words like cyprinius carpo, lepomis auritus, and esox lucius swam along the currents like real and breathing fish.
Vnuk tried to keep up with her playmates, but having no lungs, she was easily winded; having no heart, she would easily swoon. She loved to run along behind Ispan, the crown prince born already a corpse, and Sedria, the viscount’s daughter with a perfect hole through her forehead through which you could see, no matter where she stood, a foreign desert of sand and starving rabbits as clear as a window, and Geza, the underpope’s cat-eyed, seven-fingered girl, the silver ducal twins Szemmel and Szagol, and Kulacs, third in line for the throne, with his knees that bent backward like a seabird and his beautiful mouthless face. They stole joints of ham from the kitchens, books of occult philosophy and unvarnished history from the libraries, hid in wait for unsuspecting duchesses, climbed into the high gables and imitated the sobbing of ghosts until the whole palace rang with little soft lamentations and giggles and still further wailing on the subject of the horrors of the grave. They played at burnt-bone dice and taroc cards in the gardens, at pyromania in the vaults, at kisses in the shadows. But if she ran too fast (and she never could run so fast as the others, for her tower could not bend or flex like a back), Vnuk would fall sick and have to sit on the flagstones as still as winter until the spell passed. She had a horror of fire and if Szemmel and Geza’s beloved flames licked too close to her, she would scream and scream until she fell down faint. And she could not eat the quinces or the figs from the orchards the other children loved to burgle away from the harvest, though she loved them too and always tried, hoping this time, this year she would be cured of it, but with one bite she always went so pale and sick the astrologer-physicians would lock her in a crumbling unused tower, ruined, the king said to all who would listen, by the basilisk-drawn trebuchets of the enemy during the last invasion, there to drink only rainwater, eat only the yolks of the eggs of white hens, and bathe in the healing light of Scorpio for a fortnight.
Diabolists were in those days only allowed past the palace gates on Thursdays, for long ago, when glaciers could be counted in the morning like pale geese and God still spoke to man, the first king of ————, who had no name, no gender, and came from nowhere, and was therefore judged by the people to be the only one among them uncorrupted by ambition, offspring or foreign interests, asked Murmex the Impenetrable what day of the week the diabolists held holy. Murmex answered: there are few enough scraps left of the feast of days, for Sunday belongs to the Christians, Saturday to the Jews, and Friday to the Muslim with his forehead to the ground. Wednesday is the province of the pagan, Tuesday the kingdom of the tax collector, and Monday is the Great Sabbat of the owners of the means of production. Therefore we will make of Thursdays our masses, for nothing much of import happens on a Thursday, and it is with the stuff of idleness that we do our best work.
And so Archfiend the Lesser came to Vnuk on Thursdays, wearing the face he used for work, and thus in the cosmology of Vnuk, Thursday was the name of the god of knowledge. They met in a little chapel adjoining Lord Bittern’s bedchamber, eleven meters from his bedside, corresponding precisely at scale to the half kilometer between Milkdrop Hall and a particular orchard worked since before the songbirds burned by the old tarman Pkelnik and his wife. The chapel walls were thus painted round with sixty-six silver birch trees, two young fawns and their mother, a tame fox, a stone well, seventeen sour cherry trees, four bilberry bushes, a potato patch, a small thatched hut with a smoky fire burning outside, and Pkelnik himself with all his liver spots, industriously boiling bark into pitch. Beneath the brass drain in the center of the floor, a family of sleeping rabbits were painted in careful browns and greys and pinks, as real as if they meant to wake at dusk and set upon Pkelnik’s potatoes.
At first, the diabolist brought both gifts and tools to the deformed child, to ply at her in both ways. On one table, he laid out a doctor’s leather roll containing hammers, scalpels, chisels both toothed and flat, nails, needle and thread, a speculum, glass pots of exotic mortars and acids, levels and rules, shears, and vials of narcotics more powerful than prayer, all in miniature, delicate enough to work upon that famous pinhead over-populated with angels. On another table, he rolled out another physician’s hide, this one containing sticks of peppermint and cinnamon, paints and brushes of Italian glass, ivory dolls so thin and long their heads could be used as quill tips, pots of meringue and honeyed cream, and a little silver whistle with a reed of sugar cane.
Vnuk looked from the left-hand table to the right. She sighed, and the sigh sounded so awfully old in her small body.
“Someone’s painted rabbits in the drain,” the child said on that first Thursday.
“H…have they?” said Archfiend the Lesser.
“Yes. A mother and six babies. I suppose the father’s scampered off. They do that, you know. Fathers. Though I suppose I have made certain assumptions with regard to the larger rabbit. Mothers scamper off, too.”
“Ah,” said the diabolist, scratching his head beneath his green leather cap. The join between his face and his skull always itched him terribly. “Well, rabbits in the drain or no ra
bbits, we have much work ahead of us, and it’s a sin to waste a Thursday.”
“Why would someone do that, do you think?”
Archfiend the Lesser selected the little hammer and the toothed chisel. “Do what?” he said, with a whiff of exasperation.
“Paint a mother rabbit and six babies under the brass grate in the drain. It’s a very good likeness. It must have taken days. And no one will ever see them. No one even knows they’re there.”
“You’ve seen them.”
Vnuk paused and looked down at her long, slender fingers holding tight to the sash of her yellow autumn gown. “Is that enough?” she whispered. “I had to pry up the grate with a trowel.”
“If someone painted them there, that means there are rabbits in the real world, on your real estate, where these birch trees are really birch trees and your father’s bondsman really does spend his life blackening his lungs and teeth and soul with tar-smoke. Now, take this peppermint. Science waits on no man’s fancy. Or rabbit’s.”
Vnuk leaned closer to the diabolist. The grey walnut door in her belly creaked. “But surely not anymore, Archfiend. Surely they’ve all grown up by now, and had other babies. Rabbits make babies very fast, you know. There’s probably millions of them running all over poor Pkelnik’s potatoes, because no one’s there to hunt them for stew. What are you going to do to me with that hammer and that chisel? Is it something you’ve already done to the other children?”
Archfiend the Lesser had spent the holy days of all the other religions stirring his courage round and round to this day. He had worn the stern, severe, sharp-cheekboned face of work. It had grey hair, though he was a young man, in case he needed the extra authority. He’d tried to forget about the child of Vnuk and concentrate only on the tower of Vnuk. All his brothers of the diabolists college agreed that she herself was irrelevant, surplus, no more to be worried over than the apple-skin which covers the apple, which was only there to keep the fruit from going brown too soon. Yet there she sat, with her black buttressed throat, her blue hair rippling over her shoulders, nearly down to the floor that concealed those painted, sleeping rabbits.
“There are no other children like you,” he rasped. “A baby born with no eyes or seven fingers on each hand or a even wolf’s tail is still within the bounds of positable humanity, however unpleasant to look at. It is something Aristotle could imagine. Something findable within the pages of Herodotus. You…are not.”
“Ispan is a corpse, and he’s going to be king. I don’t think you took a crowbar to the king.”
“You have me there.”
“Please tell me. I’ll know in a minute anyway, once you’re doing it to me.”
Archfiend the Lesser tried to think of Lord Bittern’s daughter as an apple-skin. “As it is our first day, I thought we would begin slowly. I mean to remove those three little blue bricks near the kidney area, and perhaps one of the lancet windows, through which opening I will pass my instruments in order to begin a rough calculation of your interior volume. Perhaps, if we are lucky, even find the source of that light in your aorta.”
“Will it hurt?”