It was the thought of heaviness that moved her to consider what had actually happened the night she had carried out the princess’s wishes. The time since then had been full of duties and responsibilities, there had been no time for consideration, but that word, “heaviness,” now sent her mind back to the quiet, candlelit room where the princess had died.
The princess had been frantic. She had wanted Xulai to find, bring, and then swallow a thing. The princess had died of a curse. So it was said. So the duchess herself had said, there in the woods. Xu-i-lok had known a curse had come upon her, known from the beginning that someone sought her death, not only of the body but of the self, the soul, the being.
If one were cursed, perhaps one would want to put one’s soul beyond reach. And perhaps, if one were dying, one would want to be sure that soul was given to the carrier who would have the strength to take it home.
Was that what it had been? She caught Abasio’s eyes on her, serious and quiet.
“I never knew her,” he said, speaking directly to Xulai. “But I imagine she was a quiet woman of great dignity who never spoke of things better left unsaid.”
Precious Wind nodded, and Oldwife Gancer echoed the notion. “You speak truly, sir. She spoke often of important matters, of things we needed to think of and consider, but she never spoke of things better left in silence.”
“A trait we might all seek to emulate,” said Precious Wind.
“Yes,” murmured Abasio, his eyes on Xulai’s face. “Yes, that is true.”
Xulai took a deep breath. “I will try to behave as she did. In her honor.”
Abasio smiled, an almost invisible smile. Nothing more was said until they reached Woldsgard, and even then, they spoke only of ordinary things. Abasio took his meal with Great Bear and Precious Wind. Xulai had guessed why. Abasio was determined to make close friends of Xulai’s people and do it as quickly as he could. She was glad he took his supper with them that night while she had her own supper in the kitchen. She did not feel like talking and retreated to her bed when she had finished, sleeping through all the night, as though there were not enough sleep in the world to rest her heart.
Chapter 2
The Journey
“When will he tell her?” Dame Cullen asked the cook.
“Shh,” Cook replied. “She can hear you.”
Dame Cullen turned, her glance scraping the table’s wood to its grain, the wall’s stone to its heart, finding nothing there to warrant her attention, a rare occasion, for the wife of Crampocket Cullen was as dedicated to the welfare of Woldsgard as was the steward himself. Neither of them need look far to find faults in others’ care of the place. Pinch-lipped, Cook nodded toward the chimney corner, where only Xulai’s knees could be seen, the rest of her hunched and snuggled into the warmth of the curved inglenook, a bowl of oatmeal in her lap. Across from her sat Abasio, whose presence Dame Cullen thought it impossible to account for.
“Hmph,” said Dame Cullen, casting one of her most reproving sneers in Abasio’s direction. “For years I’ve wondered why she isn’t out playing with the other children. Our children not good enough for her?”
“The duke keeps her close because of why she came here,” said Cook sharply. “The princess was cursed; Xulai came because of that. Keeping her safe is the point of it; good or bad enough doesn’t enter in.”
“Well then, when will he tell her?”
“Tonight, I should imagine,” said Cook very softly.
Dame Cullen never spoke softly. “Young for what’s coming, the dwarfish thing.”
Abasio considered the unpleasant words had been directed at him as much as at anyone and he replied, his voice slow, authoritative, and quietly admonitory. “Not dwarfish, madam. The Tingawans are said to be slow growing, long of life, slow to age, which may prove to be a good thing, considering the years that may pass before the way to the west will be peaceful enough that Xulai can fulfill her task.”
Dame Cullen, who found sources of insult as easily as she imagined cobwebs in corners, tossed her head and swept out of the kitchen, her stiff skirts scurrying along the floor like the scuttle of a dozen rats. In the chimney corner with the chipmunk half-hidden in a fold of her skirt, Xulai suddenly saw and heard the rats, the lead rat insistent upon the cadence, his whispery squeak keeping his fellow rats in step until they reached Dame Cullen’s bedchamber. She looked up to meet Abasio’s eyes.
He winked at her and asked, “Do you hear them? When she gets upstairs, they’ll all come rushing out, gnashing their yellow teeth and scaring her half to death.”
“Oh, I heard them,” said the chipmunk. “An army of them.”
Xulai’s jaw dropped, though only a little. Things had become stranger than usual during the past few days. Had the chipmunk actually spoken? In the woods, she was sure it had. Later she thought she’d imagined it. Had Abasio given her a vision? She thought so, but she could have imagined that, too. She had been almost sure she had imagined it, but then, how to explain that Abasio imagined the same thing? Or could it be his imagining, which he had somehow put into her head? Some imaginings did persist. For example, sometimes when she looked into water, she imagined she could swim into its depths without needing air. Sometimes when she looked at herself in a mirror, she imagined she saw someone else, someone older, larger, and very powerful! Those imaginings were more than a little frightening. She had never mentioned them to Bear or Precious Wind. They would tell her to stop imagining any such thing. But she rather enjoyed the thought of Dame Cullen being attacked by an army of rats. She had no right to suppose that Xulai didn’t want to play with other children, for she did want to! At least, she had wanted to—some years ago.
There had been a time when she had watched them from behind a window shutter, little groups of them moving about, full of self-importance, almost always with a studied confidence that Xulai believed they must have learned somewhere, from someone. In their movements, their voices, each of them seemed to know exactly what was appropriate, what came next, a calm assurance that had baffled Xulai. In time, she had come to understand that they were pretending! Each of them was being someone else! This one was father, that one mother, this one the guest invited to tea. Or, again, that one was a nameless assassin, this one a Wold warrior, the third one a Wold friend who arrived in time to save his companion’s life. As soon as Xulai figured it out, their confidence was understandable. They were not being themselves at all; they were not subject to agonies of self-betrayal, to having forbidden thoughts, feelings, and dreams, persistent anxiety and fear of failure. They were being other people, people who weren’t real, and whatever poise they might have lacked in their own lives could be pretended in another life with great virtuosity. How wonderful to be someone other than oneself! Someone who couldn’t be hurt, or killed, or lost in some terrible spasm of obliteration that she knew existed, that she had always known existed though she could not remember being told. No one had told her. She just knew.
Once she knew what they were doing, she had tried to join them, but only a few times, for she could not fit in. She lacked the words to describe what she played at. What did she know of fathers, heroes, or assassins, of warriors and friends? Then, too, it did not help her that all the children seemed slightly afraid of her, or of what she was said to be. In the mythology of Norland, only the Wasting God carried souls, but the souls he carried were only the leftover, twisted, rotten ones. All truly virtuous souls were snatched into the pastures of paradise as they drew their last breaths. There they were replanted to bloom endlessly as flowers under perfumed skies. Though Xulai was obviously not twisted, ancient, and evil, as was the Wasting God, she was still tainted by association.
But none of that mattered now. Precious Wind and the Great Bear of Zol had told her a thousand times that death changes and upsets things. If the princess’s death had not prepared Xulai for change, certainly the funeral would have done so, and if that hadn’t done it, Abasio’s continued presence would have, all by itself. Ye
sterday he had put his hand on her shoulder, leaned close to her ear, and told her firmly that he was staying with her. Wherever she was going, he was going also, he said. He had also said he didn’t know why, in particular, but sometimes he decided to do things without knowing why, just for the nicanotch of it.
“Nicanotch?”
“The whatever. In lieu of a swear word. Obscenity. Scatological comment. Nicanotch.”
“I may be a very long time,” she said. “Won’t you be homesick?” Xulai was already homesick, and it was on her mind.
“Will I be homesick?” he had repeated in a thoughtful voice. Well, would he? “Home was a farm I had been eager to leave from the time I was old enough to walk. Home was a city so filthy, so violent, and so torture ridden that I sometimes shudder when I remember it. Home was a few good friends or, rather, good fellows who could be depended upon if one were under attack, though—for the most part—if they had shared one thoughtful new idea among them, it would have surprised me greatly. Home was a long journey into new lands to the south while people died all around me, cut down like a harvest of grain. Home was one woman, one woman I loved, love, gone now, leaving only her speaking, thinking spirit behind. Home held another woman I had been with but never met, but who, I was assured, would raise my son to heroic stature by sheer force of will. Home was that son, not yet born when I left, a son I unintentionally fathered though I was unconscious before, during, and for some time after the act. Home was a war in which too many good men and creatures died, irreplaceable men, irreplaceable creatures, irreplaceable love.”
She felt shattered, unaccustomed to being given so much, so truly, though she had understood it completely! His words made her feel as though she was not a child at all! “So, I guess you’re not homesick.”
“I’ve never really found a home,” he said quite honestly. “So, you’re right. I don’t suppose I’ll be homesick.”
“Well then, you need to come with me to see what the duke, my cousin, has to say.” Since she was the princess’s Xakixa and her duty had officially begun, the duke would certainly have something to say. It would have surprised her if he had not, though no more than her constant state of surprise at being where she was and doing whatever it was she was supposed to do.
“Why did they pick me to be Xakixa?” she had repeatedly asked Bear and Precious Wind over the years.
The answer had never changed: “They needed someone of her lineage who could be away a long time. You’re of the same family as the princess; you were an orphaned child without people to worry over you; who better to send far away for what might be a lifetime?”
To which Precious Wind sometimes added, “When the princess fell ill, no one thought that the sickness was necessarily fatal. It was while the matter was still uncertain that they sent me to bring you from Tingawa. Back then, they really thought you might be with her for a very long time.”
“Bear didn’t come until later, did he?”
“No, Bear was sent later. To help me care for you and protect you.”
Xulai knew she must have been very young when she came to Wold, for she had no memories of Tingawa at all. Her earliest memories were of farms and fields and certain places in and around Woldsgard Castle, of Oldwife Gancer, of Precious Wind, of the princess, who had then been in full command of her mind and voice, though her body was already very weak and frail. Woldsgard Castle had been her world, her home. The princess had been the sun that warmed that world. Her family had been a small one: Oldwife Gancer. The princess. Bartelmy, maybe. Bear, though Bear was more like the weather than he was like family: changeable day by day. Justinian, Duke of Wold.
She knew the duke less well than the others. His portrait on the great staircase wall showed him as a powerful, handsome man with golden hair and neatly trimmed beard, piercing eyes, a mouth both stern and kindly. He was now thin, gray, and sorrowful, his eyes bleary from being too often buried among books in his vast library or sequestered among his birds in the tower. He had always treated Xulai kindly, though never too intimately, as though her close company was too remindful of the long dying that had brought her there. Somehow, Xulai had understood this from the beginning. She did not count his reserve as a slight toward herself.
Though many had loved the princess, only Justinian and Xulai and a few others really mourned her. Most of the people of Wold had done their mourning years ago, when it became known she was dying, but as Precious Wind had said even then, “Long dying outlasts grief.” The dying had been long, years long, continuing as seasons passed and returned and passed again. Near the end of those years the princess had lain silent, eating nothing except the broth and gruel spooned down her throat, supposedly insensible of the world around her, balanced on the brink of mortality like a lone, frail tree at the crumbling edge of an abyss.
Xulai, perhaps only Xulai, had known the tree was not as frail as it seemed. There, above that everlasting chasm, Princess Xu-i-lok had driven the fibers of her life deep within the stone, spending her waning strength to stay alive until Xulai would become old enough and brave enough to complete the task the princess had given her, the task of hiding or keeping safe the thing in the box. Xulai had become fully aware of this only in the last two days, and she was now overcome with guilt at that knowing.
Had she known the princess was only holding on until Xulai returned from the temple? If so, should she have made herself go to the temple sooner and ended the princess’s pain? Or should she have delayed, just to keep the princess alive? Which would have been the proper choice? Precious Wind said there was always a proper choice, though Bear disputed that.
“Sometimes any choice is a bad choice, only slightly better, if at all, than doing nothing,” he said sometimes when a quandary presented itself. “Ofttimes I know I can do only this or that, and I will regret either!”
Without mentioning either the princess or her own late-night quest into the forest, and certainly without mentioning what had happened in the princess’s room when she and Abasio had returned, Xulai had probed at Precious Wind, hoping for some enlightenment. “Someone should have told me what was expected of me. I’m supposed to be a soul carrier, but no one has ever explained anything about it!”
“There is little enough to explain,” Precious Wind had replied. “When a Xakixa arrives after a death, he or she keeps watch beside the tomb for three days, announcing from time to time, in formal language, that he or she is the Xakixa, so the soul will know whom to attach to. That is considered sufficient. When the Xakixa arrives before the death, as you did, it is obligatory to visit the dying regularly and to lay hands upon the coffin for the same reason.”
“As if telling the soul you’re still there?” asked Xulai doubtfully.
“Something of the kind. In any case, you have done what is required.”
Nothing was said about hiding anything, finding anything, swallowing anything at all. Nothing was said about searching through darkness for some kind of hibernating jeweled pollywog! Bear and Wind knew nothing about that, and this morning, when Xulai had suggested discussing it with them, it was Abasio’s counsel (as well as that of the chipmunk) that she say nothing at all about it, at least not yet. If the princess had kept silent, then Xulai should keep silent.
The princess had not been taciturn. She had been fond of sayings, “fumitos” in Tingawan, pithy adages that held more wisdom than they seemed at first to do. “Velipe vun vuxa duxa vevo duxa” was one. “Wisdom grows from piling nothing on nothing.” Or “Pontos potentos al axis alentos,” which meant “The first place to hunt for information is in your own head.” In the last few days, Xulai had realized this was simply a longer way of saying what Abasio said more briefly: “Think!”
“I don’t understand ‘Pontos potentos . . .’ at all,” Xulai had grumbled long ago.
“Oh, you really do,” the princess had responded. “Suppose I need to know something about horses. Do I go out onto the parapet and shout into the air, ‘I need to know about horses’?”
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“No. You would go find Horsemaster.”
“And where did you find that name, Horsemaster?”
“In my head.”
“Right, and if you had not known that name, you would have known some other name of someone you could ask. Instead of sitting about saying ‘I don’t know,’ you can always start with something you do know to find out things you don’t. ‘Velipe vun / em euxati nun / corusus apun / zusa paflotun.’ ‘All wisdom grows / from curiosity seeds / planted in pots / full of ignorance.’ Paflotun, ignorance, is far better fertilizer than false certainty, which allows nothing to grow at all.”
“What about that other one, about connecting nothings?”
“Suppose I lost a bracelet. Then I saw a certain page flush deep red and begin to sweat when it was mentioned. Then later I saw him sneaking into the stable and coming out with dirt on his hands; what would you suppose?”
“That perhaps he took it,” said Xulai. “And hid it in the stable somewhere.”
“I am so glad you said perhaps. You would not know that for sure, but devo, piling, duxa devo duxa, little bit on little bit, assembles possibilities,” said the princess. “One should explore all the possibilities, though one may neither accuse nor exonerate until one knows for sure . . .”
There were years of the princess’s fumitos in Xulai’s head. Even when the princess could no longer speak aloud, Xulai had visited, sitting close, stroking the princess’s single long braid as it faded over the years from jet, to ash, to silver. She had spent hours chattering like a magpie about utterly boring and inconsequential things: the kitchen cat’s latest kittens in their box beneath the stove; the tree in the orchard she had climbed to pick fruit so Cook could make a tart for dinner; the new surcoat Nettie Lean, the seamstress, was making for her. Her mouth had grown numb with chatter designed to bore the serving woman sitting nearby, bore her until she fell asleep or went for a walk or decided to visit the privies. If Xulai babbled long enough, the watchers always did one or the other.