The Fecund's Melancholy Daughter Read online

  At the waterline, where paler scales stretched to near translucency, ripples on the swamp made duckweed ride up and down. Setting her jaw, bands of muscle hardened the angled jowls, though it was difficult to tell if the monster was truly angry or not.

  “Now,” she said, “where were we?”

  The chatelaine reclined on her canopy bed, ensconced inside the palace of Jesthe, and decided, upon putting down her second cup of coffee—which was empty now, and clattering on her bedside table—that she would leave her chambers, go for a walk. Perambulate. Work the legs. She called to her women: fetch clothes suitable for outside, and fetch them quickly. Before she could change her mind. Lately there had been too many days of inactivity, laying about, drinking herself to sleep or staring listlessly out the window at the roofs of her city.

  Out on the crowded streets, the day was gloomy, as most were, but it was not raining, at least, like it had been for the past fortnight. With almost a spring in her step, the chatelaine walked ahead of her servants, who awkwardly carried the various items they supposed a woman such as the chatelaine might need on a brief journey outside Jesthe. Servants were unaccustomed to any mood other than a somber one in their mistress and, frankly, they preferred when she stayed abed, moping.

  Huffing and panting, arms laden, the women struggled to keep up.

  Near the secondary refuse pile, at Hot Gate—a vast heap of steaming garbage against the sagging wall of an empty seminary—the chatelaine, who had been waving blithely to citizens, greeting them as they begged or jostled or otherwise tried to acquire food to feed their families, suddenly froze. She knew why she’d been impelled to leave her bedchambers at that particular second and go out, into Nowy Solum. The chatelaine was a woman who believed in destinies, and in the purposes of mysterious motivations, giving reasons to every gesture and idle action as if everything were ordained. (She had not always believed this, nor would she believe it for much longer, but on this day, the day of the walk, she felt sure that the mysterious and powerful forces of fate moved her and the lives of those around her.)

  “I wish to speak to that girl,” she told her servants, pointing with an unsteady finger. Her heart raced.

  The women squinted, shifting their loads, making faces to indicate their confusion and distaste.

  “I don’t see any girls,” one finally answered, either the boldest or stupidest of the lot. Certainly the largest. “My Lady,” the woman added, as an afterthought, to try to make herself perfectly clear, “I see no girls.”

  The chatelaine, who had continued to point all this while, shook her finger. “There!”

  “I see two, well, there are two melancholics, in the garbage.”

  “Yes, that’s right. And one of them is a girl. I wish to speak to her. She’s beautiful and I wish to speak to her.”

  The servants did not know what to say. They were very uncomfortable and getting more uncomfortable with each passing second. (Though, working, as they did, for the chatelaine, this sensation was almost part of their job.)

  “In fact,” continued the chatelaine, “I want her on the staff at Jesthe. Make sure she gets employment in my palace.” This was an incredible statement, thought the chatelaine of Nowy Solum. This was bold, brave. The world was changing and she, the chatelaine, would drive these changes. Just a few nights ago, they said, there had been reports of a heavenly body over the city. A god, some said. The chamberlain had almost smiled. Yes, the world was changing. She filled her lungs. She felt very alive. She had not felt this alive in a long time.

  “Employ— But, marm,” complained the servants, “we need no more, not like her.”

  Without humour, the chatelaine laughed. “I want this girl working up on my level. I want to see her in the Main Hall. I want to see her in the Dining Room. I want to see that pretty, tattooed face in my bedchambers.”

  Silence again.

  “I won’t put up with this, you know. Approach her!”

  “But,” said another servant, very quietly, “she doesn’t really, uh, exist.”

  “Nonsense.” The chatelaine wheeled. “Of course she exists. We can all see her. She’s right there!”

  By this point, of course, the pair of kholics had taken note of the chatelaine and her entourage and had stopped doing what they’d been doing. They stood, filthy, knee-deep in garbage, eyes lowered, no doubt as uncomfortable as the chatelaine’s servants.

  Under their masks, the girl and the boy had identical features, and must have been twins, though neither the chatelaine, nor certainly her women, had the capacity to notice such detail.

  A jolt passed down the length of the fecund.

  “Who’s there? Huh? I remember the cold vacuum of space, and a murdered body, floating face down in the river. Was the chatelaine heading out for a walk? Was I dreaming?” Her eyes flicked open. “These threads all drill into my head at the same time. What I’m trying to say is that there’s more to a story than events taking place in one location, to one person. You need to look at everything, at the same time, in the entire universe. Look at every person, every creature. Turn over every rock.

  “See? In one glistening instant, plucked from the stream of time as it passes by: countless episodes, from a myriad of human lives, all vital, all entangled in a shared moment.

  “So many threads . . .”

  A few heartbeats of quiet, then a sigh.

  “But we can’t follow them all, I suppose. You’re right. Too many lives. And there is more than just one universe. At times I get so overloaded. Here, in Nowy Solum, in your city, there are masons, derelicts, housewives. Human, cobali. Dog-faced cognosci.”

  The fecund’s eyes had begun to nictitate again. Her skinny tongue flickered twice. Breathing slowed. Both eyes closed. If the fecund had not previously been asleep, she sure was now.

  Grumbling servants fetched the girl—the nasty kholic—and led her into Jesthe through the side entrance. From there, up the East Stairs. This chore was accomplished at dusk, on the chatelaine’s order, when neither chamberlain Erricus or any of his palatinate were around, for their protests in the daily assemblies would have been most relentless and insufferably dull. As it was, in the days since the sighting of the celestial apparition, the smug attitudes and righteousness of the palatinate had been dreadful. But they were not welcome anywhere above ground level in the palace, and had not been welcome there since the chatelaine first inherited the city from her father; once the kholic girl was safely up in the living areas, with the chatelaine’s staff, she was pretty much in the clear.

  Would the chatelaine tell her father about bringing the girl inside? What would be the point? He had retreated long ago, in more ways than one, up the towers, to the dungeon. He had his own problems. He would never see the girl either.

  Given a pallet to sleep on and a rough shift to wear, the kholic was (much to her surprise) more or less left alone. In fact, given menial tasks, like any other servant, she was soundly shunned and ignored. Only a few times over her first few days in the palace did the chatelaine manage to come by, to engage in small talk, or to half-heartedly admire the girl as she worked, but the chatelaine’s moods had begun to swing again, as they often did, and she ended up spending most of the girl’s initial fortnight in Jesthe nowhere near as enthusiastic as she had initially been, locked instead in her bedchambers with bottles of spiritus and a procession of nameless bedfellows, all in hopes of chasing away internal darkness, which inevitably slunk back, over and over, just as the chatelaine began to hope it might never return again.

  The monster’s outbursts contained nuggets of truth. They always did, if one was patient enough to sift. Twelve gods had indeed descended. The sky became obscured by clouds that never again parted. Now, in Nowy Solum, empty temples disintegrated.

  And time—for people, anyhow—was a relentless river. Every citizen—except for the youngest of children, and those of infirm minds—knew this for a fact.

  The monster snored. Parthenogenesis took its toll. Her sides r
ose and fell, rose and fell, in almost peaceful rhythm. Without a doubt, something growing inside that infamous womb kicked.

  Had there been lies in the speech too, or speculation? Had words been said only for the sake of their sounds?

  Most likely.

  Moments slipped away, to become the past, joining millions of others mingling in the fading torrent. Only subjective memories would live on, and, even then, briefly, flickering in the minds of just a few.

  Like the fecund had implied.

  Elements of decay, elements of entropy. Now that the era of gods was over, taking with it the promise of eternal salvation, contaminants of impermanence and mortality had once again been integrated into each event, into each moment, into each human life. Thankfully, though, small fragments of beauty remained, entangled with the abominations. Laughter and music were inseparable from pain and injustice.

  Grumbling, the fecund stretched again in her sleep, and let out a bubbling fart.

  Night fell on half the world and day was about to begin in Nowy Solum. But there were in-between places even the fecund could never understand. Nether regions haunted flickering gaps between sickness and health, between gods and godlessness, between life and time and the inevitability of death. Nether regions straddled night and day.

  The snoozing monster would never hear of this, even if she were awake; she would dismiss these claims forthright. Because, she would tell you, she knows everything. Then she would demand food. Or make lascivious comments. Or, in the particularly garrulous mood she had been in of late, lecture endlessly.

  The fecund mumbled in her sleep. One clawed hand twitched.

  Best tiptoe away.

  Abandoned, the twin brother was, like the chatelaine, plagued by dark thoughts. Being a kholic, though, this was the expected state. All those like him, tattooed at birth, veins thick with treacle, were thus inflicted, to greater or lesser degrees—especially those whose hearts laboured to pump the thickest, blackest of melancholy. At this boy’s birth trial, no fluids at all had leaked from the cut made by the palatinate physicker; the officer had squeezed the tiny arm, and squeezed it again, to finally reveal the slightest ooze of the pitch black humour that gave the baby life and condemned him, forever, to the ostracon, with the others of his temperament.

  Naturally, the twin sister was also marked and removed, since they had shared a womb.

  Their weeping mother was dismissed, empty handed, from Bedenham House.

  Without his sister for the first time, the boy had slipped into an uglier and more self-destructive phase than usual. Seeing his twin led away by the chatelaine and her servants, without so much as a protest, or even a backward glance, had caused him, as the fecund would say in her vernacular, to snap. He howled, and he fumed, and he consumed vast quantities of ale and the hallucinogenic drug cultured from certain mould on stale bread, known in the streets of Nowy Solum as bud. He wanted to die. He got into fights with other kholics, wheeling through rooms and narrow halls of the ostracon, staggering alleys and streets. He blacked out entire afternoons. He woke up sick and vomited copiously in gutters. He stopped working altogether, letting garbage and shit and dead animals pile up around him while he glared at the silhouette of Jesthe, rising crookedly above the cluttered slums.

  Because he was tattooed, his behaviour was tolerated, or rather, it was generally ignored. Perhaps even unnoticed, some would say. Kholics were known to be a morose bunch, prone to such outbursts. As long as the boy did not come into direct contact with a red-blooded hemo, who then complained to the palatinate, he could act pretty much any damn way he pleased, even dying on the streets with a mouth full of froth, for all anyone official cared.

  But the boy did come into contact with a hemo. During this ranting and drugged-out stumbling around, cursing the clouds, railing against his lot, a beautiful and untagged girl watched from a market stall, on Tornblanket Street—which passed behind the ostracon. She circled closer, drawn to the suffering and low status of the kholic boy. To be succinct, this girl craved challenges and drama, and she was the sort who, like the chatelaine herself, had a predisposition for flawed lovers and doomed relationships. Nowy Solum was large enough, and decadent enough, to have many types. Of course, it helped that the boy (and his sister, who, at that point, felt rather surprisingly lonely in the palace) were also beautiful to behold—at least for those who took the time, or had the inclination or ability, to behold the tattooed outcasts of the city.

  Bounding rabbit-like, braver children played in warrens that tunnelled into the rear of the palace, dashing out and then daring each other to go back in, farther and farther. One or two passages, children claimed—red-faced and breathless—led right into ramshackle rooms and cavernous chambers and larders stocked with dried foods. A few kids, mostly friends of friends, even returned with entire loaves of bread, or with actual stockings, but these treasures seemed few and far between, and the sources of the goods remained, predominantly, rumour.

  Most tunnels ended at solid rock.

  During the castellan’s reign, before he retreated up the towers, into the dungeon, and handed Nowy Solum over to his daughter, children told each other that if they were caught inside Jesthe, they would be strapped to an operating table and vivisected, to be used in experiments. But when the chatelaine took over, well, stories changed, became more vague. There seemed nobody left in the palace to catch them, and what did the woman do in there, anyhow? People said she banned the palatinate from the inner halls and rooms of Jesthe just so they couldn’t watch over her at night, and judge her. Many visitors, for certain, emerged looking a little worse for wear, into the cloudy dawn.

  And there was talk, as always, of a monster living in a cell under the palace, the fecund, and of a strange menagerie in the chatelaine’s bedchamber, beasts that she treated as if they were her own offspring, but no stories were passed down as clear and visceral as the tales of amputations and tortures done in the father’s time, and from the even more barbaric times before that. Just what the chatelaine might get up to inside the palace was elusive for the children, beyond the grasp of young and healthy conceptions. They scared each other with stories about what could happen if they got caught, but, in the end, imagination failed them. This failure, of course, and the dim chances of being chased, diminished the thrill of trespassing.

  That, and growing older.

  Maybe kids still went into the narrow passageways, with exhilaration in their hearts and throats. Who knew?

  Not the red-blooded girl, telling these stories to her kholic lover one afternoon as they lay on her thin mattress of straw while, outside, rain drummed on the packed dirt of Hanover Street. The boy had brought up the palace again, as he often did in their brief relationship, and he muttered about how his sister had been brought inside, and how much he hated the chatelaine for plucking his twin from the streets, as if she were a flower, a curiosity to be put in a vase and then discarded when she’d gone yellow and withered.

  Lying there, listening now to the beautiful girl talk about her childhood—a red-blooded kid, playing in the warrens of Jesthe, like only red-blooded kids could—the kholic stared up at a moist stain on the ceiling. He chewed at his nails. He could get used to ticking as soft as this. One hand was behind his head. The beautiful girl held his cock, slowly making it hard again. He licked his lips, thinking about mattresses and monsters, thinking about experiments in dungeon towers.

  He pictured the warrens, burrowed right into the foundation of the palace, and the nearly deserted hallways within.

  He considered the chatelaine’s beloved pets.

  As the hemo went down on him, and took his cock into her hot mouth, the kholic had begun to form a plan, to try get his sister back, and to teach the chatelaine a lesson.

  Grey rocks, grey clouds. Cold, grey rain. Father had gone inside, snoring loudly. No lizards here, in the rain. Very few birds. With an open mouth, head back, rain felt funny on his tongue.

  In the distance, lightning burst.
/>   His name was path. And he watched, squinting through the rain, listening for thunder, trying to remember what his father had said about counting the seconds. He smiled; path liked storms.

  But as the rain intensified, and winds picked up, the smile faded. Storms were good when he was inside, not deposited here, in the garden. He had forgotten this distinction. His father had been drinking spiritus all morning and would not wake up, no matter how close the lightning came, or how loud the storm got, or if path started to scream at the top of his lungs.

  Mud started to splash up the sling, as far as path’s torso. Anxious, he wriggled his stumps, croaking, “Da? Daaa?”

  Abruptly, the rain stopped.

  Remote thunder, rolling overhead, a few drops pattering the puddles—which were rapidly soaking into the sandy soil—and the land around released its heat, once more, in a stifling surge.

  Then path saw two lizards coming, sweeping low over the steaming rocks, heading for the small garden. Yellow lizards. He chortled, and was preparing to terrify the reptiles—as soon as they landed—when he saw another light suddenly appear before him; not lightning this time but a thin finger, pinkish, dead straight.

  From above the clouds.

  He cocked an eyebrow.

  He quivered his stumps.

  “Da?”

  Slowly the finger of light moved toward him, stopping at the base of his sling. Looking down at it, path felt his body tingle.

  When the light jumped, almost too fast for him to follow, there was a moment of exquisite pain—

  And he was taken away. Other worlds filled him, other times.

  Another life:

  Born with healthy ovaries and bad prospects, she was registered, naturally, for the lottery. Before her first birthday, the State interned her in one of their hospices, Balhaven, just outside Newark, where she lived with other girls who shared her history. Her biological parents could afford neither the money, the time, nor the patience to take care of her.