Slowly, Agnes nodded. She tried to mount an enthusiasticexpression. Clearly she was not very successful, because Liuprand then frowned and asked her, “Does this please you?”
She nodded again. Still Liuprand did not look particularly convinced, but it did not matter much. Her pleasure or displeasure was nothing that would affect the political maneuvering of princes and kings.
Liuprand left the topic behind, gaze skewing toward the book she had open. “What an interesting tome you’ve chosen,” he said, the corner of his mouth quirking.
Frowning, Agnes looked down at the book. She could not tell what amused him about it. Then she turned the page.
But queer enough, when the knight came to the hydra’s cave, she was not a serpent at all but halfway to a woman, her body patterned with green scales and her hair black as tongues, breasts heavy with venom rather than milk. And when he thrust into her, it was not with the point of his sword.
This was accompanied by a wondrously vivid drawing. Heat rushing to her face, Agnes slammed the book shut.
Liuprand seemed to be biting back a smile as she rose immediately and returned the book to its place on the shelf. Still blushing profusely, she took down the next book she could find and, after leafing through it to ensure she had not selected another surreptitious tale of obscenity, returned to the table. She sat and refused to meet the prince’s eye. Silence curled through the heady golden air.
“You may read whatever you like, you know,” he said at last. “There is a time and place for all tales, even the bawdy and bestial ones.”
Amusement made his voice light and musical, but Agnes did not feel that he was mocking her. It was too gentle for that. Liuprand turned to his own book, the title of which she still could not manage to glimpse, and opened it to a marked page. After casting one final, secret glance in his direction, Agnes opened her book as well.
And then, heads bowed, they read in a strange but companiable silence.
XV
Ruinous Fruit
The Exarch rose from his cot in total darkness, as had been his custom ever since Widsith the Precious had sealed off the one window into the chapel. He lived now as a dove in a dovecote, and the melted wax on the walls and on the altar were like his droppings. The tattered ends of his ceremonial robes dragged on the floor behind him, clearing a path through the dust that had gathered as thickly as a layer of ash over a decimated city.
He must light one candle on each end of the seven-pointed altar and then work inward, slowly, moving from point to point, until the whole altar glowed like a star. It would have been easier of course to start in the middle, and light every candle on each arm of the star, but this was not the will of God. The Exarch also did not concern himself with his own longevity. If the sleeve of his robe caught fire and he burned to death, that would be the will of God. Because he believed God’s will existed only within these walls, and nowhere else on this dreary, death-soaked island, he must do all he could to preserve it.
This ritual was also important because it was the only manner by which he could measure time. It took fourteen seconds to light each candle with his tremulous, age-spotted hand. And then sixteen seconds to shuffle to the next altar point. By the time he was finished, that was the morning, and the brightly flaring altar was his dawn, and his breakfast would be arriving soon.
The Exarch then sat back on his cot. He lifted the hem of his robe to examine the tumescent bulge on his left leg, which had been at first onlythe size of a grape but now was a throbbing purple mass that more resembled an eggplant growing beneath his skin. It made his gait even more labored. But if the tumor had grown within these walls, it was the will of God. He was God’s garden and in him God had planted a ruinous fruit. Who was he to try to chisel away at the architecture of his impending demise? He would be no better than the godless heathens of Drepane, who thought they could pilfer from death like four-fingered thieves.
The thought of fruit made the Exarch’s stomach whimper. His breakfast should have come by now, delivered as it always was on a very tottery silver tray. He considered rising, but why? The door to the chapel locked from the outside and could not be breached. And on the highest floor and in the remotest tower, he could bellow and pound on the walls and no one would hear. He could even set fire to the chamber, and it would be hours before anyone glimpsed the smoke.
Before he could ponder whether or not God had decided that today should be the start of his starving to death, with all the many implications of that conceit, the door rasped open.
From the hallway came a shaft of light, uncommonly gold. The Exarch squinted as the light planked his face.
“Good morning, Your All-Holiness,” said the prince.
“You?” The Exarch coughed out this syllable. “What need have I of you?”
Lit from the back, with the candle flames dancing in his overly blue eyes, the prince smiled. “You have need of breakfast, I presume.”
He was carrying the Exarch’s silver tray, piled with all its usual satieties. There was the bread, only the tough ends of the loaf, toasted until their crust was blackened and they tasted equally of flour and ash. There was the dollop of honey, which he would smear on one piece of the bread using his thumb. And then, in the center, in a glazed green dish, there were six gauzy strips of cured ham, crumpled like soggy parchment. The Exarch liked to stretch out each piece until it snapped and went limp in his hand. Sometimes he amused himself by rolling the gummy meat in his palm, forming a red-and-white marble thatcould roll quite assuredly across the altar. Then he would lick his sticky palm clean, savoring the perspired oils of Seraph.
Of course he could not perform this ritual in front of the prince, so he would have to wait, which made him cross.
“Set it here,” the Exarch said, waving his hand toward the altar. There was one square of empty stone upon which the melting wax did not intrude, and the tray fit within it perfectly.
The prince set down the tray so decorously that it hardly made a sound. Then he stood back, hands clasped at his waist and head angled down, an oddly penitent position for a man born in the hurricane-eye of this heathen island, who had never once touched the radiant shorelines of Seraph.
But Seraph had touched him. The prince had hair the color of the sand on the Seraphine coast, eyes the shade of its jeweled lagoon, and the broad, powerful build of the bronze statue that stood over the entrance of the bay, ships passing beneath its spread legs, its reflection painting the water below in ripples of gold.
This softened the Exarch’s gnarled and rancorous heart. He pinched a strip of meat between his finger and thumb and lifted it, light shining through the translucently pink and white-veined morsel.
“This animal knew the scent of the Dogaressa’s perfume,” he said. “Rosewater and morning dew. It counted every feather on the winged lion as it walked through the city gates. It heard the arias from the opera house. It felt the gentle lilt of a canal boat on a hazy summer night.”
“Then this was the most illustrious and genteel pig in Seraph.”
