backdated 05/25
She had told Gouvernail that one day, an entire visit to the Garde might pass without the two of them getting into a fight.
She had expected it to be some distant good, but she was several hours into a to-do list and not only had a fight not come, she had even begun to find the drudgery lightened by the pleasure of conversation. It had begun with her explanation of why she had brought a dog kennel and why she was dogproofing a couple of rooms - as a bomb shelter made very little sense unless it could shelter Petitcru, as well - which had grown into an exchange of stories and anecdotes about dogs and cats (and in his case, horses) they had known. It had then meandered, organically and erratically, into other topics.
She had imagined, vaguely, that beyond getting the shape of his history and what related to their shared conscription, they could not possibly have enough in common to sustain conversation. An hour or two, maybe, would probably deplete whatever stores there were to be had. But to her dim surprise, the talk kept rounding corners and finding new pathways, and although she would have had trouble admitting it at gunpoint, she was starting to be grateful that he was there to keep her mind as busy as her hands. He had even surprised her by manifesting a subtle and dry but extremely present sense of humor, and if he did not laugh, he at least didn't seem offended when she did, even if it was at her own jokes.
It felt like there were too many taboos to talk safely - she kept stopping herself from talking about food, imagining that this might be a particularly cruel topic for a dead man to endure, among other things - but other things, which might have seemed off-limits to almost anyone else she knew, felt safer with Gouvernail, stranded as he was on this island of isolation, out of space and time, than they could have with anyone else.
She was lying on her back on a curtain wall, catching her breath after dispatching an especially angry patch of thorny greenery, absently nursing a painful slice on the pad of her thumb between her words as she watched the greyish clouds scuttle by overhead.
"Anyway," she continued, "it took the shine off it, I guess, for a while. I'm not supposed to be a knight. I'm supposed to be a Lady. I'm supposed to be - leaning off ramparts and tying ribbons around people's arms, you know?"
That had been another surprise: the strange fluidity of history as it pertained to Gouvernail and to the Garde and, she supposed, to everything else in the world that she had taken for granted as tidy and sorted out. Things had been different a thousand years ago than she'd imagined, but she'd known that from her first conversation with him. Turns out the cosmic cosmopolitan melting pot of ten centuries back had given him more cultural experience than she would have guessed, and what seemed like it should have come too late was familiar to him, in some way.
So she had been explaining to him the significance of her tattoos, when he had, with a mildness that she had come to understand was his own particular form of gentle sarcasm, observed that she was well-armed for a knight reluctant to fight. And she had wandered off, with a timid intimacy, from knights and Excalibur and into all the messy reasons for why she, of all people, might like the idea of being a damsel in distress from time to time, in a very particular, very strange way.
He paused. "This is why you laughed," he observed, "when I called you by that word."
"Well. Sort of." It was probably a bit much to explain to him the whole concept of fedora-tipping. "But mostly, yeah. It's complicated, though. I think a lot of people don't think it makes sense, but it does."
He was silent again, and then, with an abrupt insightfulness that startled her: "You see the man with the sword as a weapon in his own turn, to be wielded by the Lady."
She hesitated, wrinkling her nose at the realization that her worrying at her thumb had opened it up to bleed again. "Yes," she said. "I never thought to put it like that, but yeah, I guess." She turned her head with a sigh to look down to the bailey below, her view unobstructed given the complete lack of walls and ramparts on this part of the ruined curtain wall, her eyes fixed on a window that she had noticed before: one of the few that still had glass, worked in red and green and painted with scrollwork. It was somewhat incongruously set into a half-timber wall belonging to one of the numerous outbuildings, which would have looked no different from the sheds to either side were it not for this bit of ornamentation. She had abandoned attempts to open the door early on, feeling it blocked from the other side by both a lock and something heavy, but as she gazed down on it now she saw that the interior of the room was bright, suggesting a window on the opposite wall - overlooking what had once been a moat and was now a swampy thicket of high trees. "Anyway," she said absently, her mind wandering over what was in that building, "I guess in a way I wasn't really surprised when it was a ribbon. But I thought it was gonna go somewhere else instead of where it did."
"Where it went is not entirely out of keeping with your original ideas," he observed with that same mildness, and she laughed.
"I guess. But it still made me a Knight instead of a Lady and I'm still gonna be pissed about it."
"Are the two so incompatible to you?"
The sun emerged from behind a bank of clouds, and the distant window glowed from within as the light poured into the room. She drew down her brows, puzzled, not by his question but by trying to imagine the unseen architecture. "Yes and no. I'm not asking you to stop calling me Lady," she said, "but I'd be happier if everyone else was too, and if someone calls me Sir Joy I'm going to flip tables." And then, before he could reply: "What is that?" She pointed.
"A store room."
"They're all store rooms, aren't they?" she said impatiently. "What's in it?"
He hesitated. "It was not often opened in my time," he said. "I had no use for what it holds." Again, a hesitation, as if he was reluctant to give her a gift that he didn't want her to have, but felt compelled to. "You might, however."
She looked back at him, gazing at his ghostly shape upside down from where she lay. Her first instinct, on meeting him, had been to flirt with him, and while that seemed like a lifetime ago and almost incomprehensible, she found herself wondering vaguely what he had looked like once, alive and out of the garb of the Garde, and remembering his long, long pause when she had asked him if he had ever held space for someone in his heart before he had told her that he had not. He had promised never to lie to her. But it had been a long hesitation before he denied it, and the shape of his profile as he turned to look also at that distant glowing window seemed to make a mockery of it. Someone, somewhere, had looked at him, at his elegant face and careless hair and dark quick eyes, in all his dutiful kindness and gentle sarcastic mildness and ready self-awareness and maybe even his hasty and angry temper, and maybe had not only flirted with him, but loved him. Maybe. It seemed impossible that it could be otherwise. Maybe they had not even needed to see him as he was in his own skin, and had loved him the more for the mail and the mystique of the Garde. Maybe it only been that he had not loved them back. "Why would I have a use for it if you didn't?" she asked, vaguely considering some sort of armory of lighter, less formidable weapons that perhaps he had considered himself too good for.
"You bring visitors often," he said, after another hesitation, his eyes still turned on the window. When he turned them back to her, he seemed almost startled that she was looking at him. "Mine was not a time of revelry."
"Oh my god," she said, sitting up with sudden delight. "Is it like - party supplies? I wish I could get in."
"I believe you could, Lady," he said quietly. "Although I fear it will be an uncomfortable thing."
"I'm already bloody," she pointed out, holding up her thumb, although by now she'd sucked the blood dry again. She scrambled to her feet, grimacing a little when the aches of all her labor suddenly returned to her as she did so. "Show me."
He had been right that it was an uncomfortable process, she reflected some twenty minutes later, as she stood ankle-deep in murky water covered in thick green slime, the fetid stink gagging her when her steps stirred up some cloud of something awful. She had only ever seen the moat from above, and never bothered to descend the half-ruined stairs into it, until now. The dark shape of a doorway into the curtain wall - some sort of maintenance access, she speculated, now inaccessible by the ruination of the little ledge that had once been a pathway to it - stood above her, and there was nothing for it. Elaine could never in a million years scale that slippery stone and heave herself into the corridor above, but Joy could. It was as well that her bulky uniform never felt heavy, even if it was uncomfortable when it was soaking wet.
She scrambled somewhat gracelessly into the dark corridor, her wet skirts and feet mingling with an inch of accumulated dust to create a muddy slurry that she tracked behind her as she walked behind Gouvernail's ghostly shape, which soon vanished in the darkness.
"I should have brought a flashlight," she said, her voice echoing in the dim. She was feeling her way carefully, nearly stumbling over debris scattered in the corridor, which she surmised was leading them through the interior of one of the bailey walls.
"We are nearly arrived," he said. "Carefully," he added, and she reached out a hand before her, feeling blindly until it rested on the termination of the narrow corridor: not on stone, but on wood.
He sounded suddenly aloof again, cold and annoyed. She could only imagine this to be in response to having to shepherd her around in the dark, and therefore spitefully took her time feeling around for the latch. To her surprise, it gave almost instantly when she pushed, and she stepped up into a sort of antechamber, a dim light filtering in from a window high above.
The little chamber was surprisingly intact. That was the damned thing about the place: the rot was so unequal. In places it truly seemed that a thousand years had ravaged the place, breaking wood down into something with the texture and strength of wet cardboard. In others, plaster stood as bright and untouched as if the painter had just set down his brush. Somewhere over their heads at this very moment the bright banner with its green canvas and gold thread snapped in the lazy wind as if it had been removed from the loom for that purpose only hours before; the mosaic floor beneath it had been devoured by time and moss.
She blinked in the sudden light, turning to examine a painted mural on the wall. There were so many of these on nearly every surface of the keep and chapel and outbuildings that she could scarcely remember most of them, but this one struck her immediately because it depicted, quite clearly, the Garde itself: a distant building with scarlet banners, looking over a forested slope down to a river, on which there floated an opulent little rowboat, where ladies, reclining beneath an embroidered canopy in the aft, sat and listened to a man playing a harp. Resting against the wall, as if to show the truth of the scene, was a pair of elaborately enameled oars.
"Oh, Nail," she said, forgetting herself and his own irritation enough to use the nickname. "Was there a little boat?"
"There were many boats," he said stiffly. "The boathouse stands even now, if you can clear a path to it."
"But a cute little boat, like this."
"It was not used in my time," he said.
"Not used? So you had it and didn't use it? Of course you didn't," she added. "God forbid you ever have fun."
"I suppose if it is still seaworthy then your guests can use it," he said, with a sudden testiness.
She was examining the other door, which unfortunately did not give way to a push. She saw that it was barred, and while there was nothing particularly formidable about the bar, its hinge, apparently, was rusted into place, despite how pristine the rest of the room was. She had not thought to bring WD-40, and cursed Gouvernail inwardly for neither knowing what WD-40 was nor having the foresight to suggest that there might be rust. But perhaps he had not known. There was nothing for it but to use force, and so she set her shoulder to it. "Yes," she said. "We're gonna sit under that little canopy and drink cheap wine and row as far down as it'll go." At his silence, she felt compelled to continue, her voice straining as she exerted herself: "I'm gonna put a dozen people in that boat to make up for you never using it. Maybe all at once, if I can figure it out."
"Will you bring them here by the dozens, then?" And there it was, at last: that trace of irritation, that edge of suppressed anger. Her goal of a visit that did not end in a fight seemed suddenly remote.
"Yes. And I don't care if you don't like it. It's mine now as much as it's yours and I like it when there's people here. Don't pretend like you don't like it. Admit it, you were thrilled to get Viatrix at your beck and call for an hour."
"I was grateful for her kind assistance to you," he said, still keeping his voice level with an audible effort.
"Well, whatever your reasoning, you were glad she was here. Maybe I'll bring others over that want you to give them the grand tour of s**t that needs to be cleaned up while I waste my time on rowboats. I don't know why you care, anyway. I'd think you'd welcome -" she stopped. Damn, damn, damn. Always with nearly touching on that horrible taboo.
"Finish your sentence," he said coldly.
"No," she said stubbornly, redoubling her efforts and trying to pull instead of push, rocking the metal back and forth as much as it would give. "I'll piss you off and then I'll get pissed off and we've been doing really good about not being pissed off today."
"You have already incurred my anger," he said, with a sudden explosion of impatience, "by this constant reluctance to touch on what you fear will wound me. Did I not tell you that doing so wounds me more? Say what you were going to say or I will forget my own promise to stop thinking of you as a coward. Say that I ought to welcome the novelty of hearing new voices, after a thousand years of silence."
"Fine," she spat, struggling to avoid raising her own voice, and then raising it anyway over the noise of the heavy door banging as she rocked it against the threshold, trying to force it open. "I'd think you'd welcome hearing new voices after a thousand ******** years of ******** silence."
"I do not welcome them. I have nothing to say to them," he said, and then, with another small explosion: "I have nothing to say to anyone, but to you. You bring me nothing but silence, when you bring visitors here. You will tell me, now, that I must love the sound of my own voice."
She had, in fact, been about to say exactly that, but was checked by having the move foreseen. "I can't say it without being a hypocrite," she said grimly. "Since I love the sound of mine."
"And I also," he said, with impatient grief. "I, too, love the sound of your voice."
This answer was so unexpected that she, finally, dropped her work, letting silence seep in where the rattling had been, and she looked at him with such open astonishment that he turned away from her as if ashamed. She felt sick, suddenly, with an unnameable fear.
"Who else can I speak to?" he continued at last, still turned away from her. "Think of me with contempt if you will, but who else can I speak to, and imagine that they listen with any means of - of hearing me. Who else can speak to me, and mean anything by it but empty courtesy? Who else can be honest to me in a way that has any meaning?"
This was, of course, nothing but the echo of what she had long thought: that he had no one else to be kind to him. That her treatment, at the end of everything, was the only treatment he could ever truly receive. But to hear it vocalized only sharpened that vague dread. A numbness fell on her.
"Can't fault you for taste," she said at last, trying to conquer the rising nausea. "Not that you picked me, but still. You coulda done worse."
"I know," he said, once again flat and tired.
"I really thought this was gonna be the day we didn't fight," she said after a moment, strangely timid.
"Was it a fight?"
"Maybe not. I hope not." A pause. "Next time I bring guests," she said, "it won't be twice in a row. But maybe you should try talking to them, and not thinking of it as - what did you call it? - empty courtesy when they're nice to you."
"It is not a skill I have ever learned to hone," he said.
"Socializing? I'm ******** shocked," she said grimly. "Never woulda guessed. Good thing you can start practicing now." She turned back to the door, kicking it sullenly. "I can't get in," she said.
"Yes you can," he said immediately. "Already it was beginning to give."
"I'm tired," she said, realizing even as she did that she was whining, and trying to course-correct. "It doesn't matter. I can do it next time."
"It is not like you to abandon a task you have taken up," he said, but it was not a sharp reprimand. It sounded tired, instead, as if he knew - as she did in the same moment - that she had lost her enthusiasm in the wake of their tiny but explosive conflict, and in the wash of strange fear that it had brought down on her.
She looked at him, and he looked back, his face exhausted, but she did not feel the usual pang of anger and impatience. She had not wronged him. It was simply that everything was wrong on its own.
She turned back towards the door. It was embarrassing, somehow, to perform this little feat of inadequate strength before him, red-faced and sweaty and incompetent. And if embarrassing for her, how much more for him, doubtless craving to help her and unable to, forced to stand uselessly by?
The cruelty and the wrongness of everything drove her to push harder, her arms straining. Blood ran down the inside of her wrist; she realized dimly she had once again burst open the thorn-p***k on her finger. And for what? To access a room designed for revelry, for celebration that he'd just told her only made him miserable?
But this was not his castle any longer. It had not been his in a thousand years. It was hers, and she would, come hell or high water, be not just the knight of it, but the lady of it as well. If he wanted her to stop handling him as if he was breakable, she would. She would stop policing her every action with a terror of reminding him of his own suspended mortality. She would open this room, and she would turn over whatever pennants and finery were inside, and she would find ways to get other people here to admire it, and to admire her as the goddamned queen of it all.
She pushed, and she felt a sudden and inexplicable surge of strength and almost fell to the floor when the door suddenly, in the wake of a power she did not know she had, gave. She felt the energy surging through her, felt her feet newly dry, and she stretched out her hands, which trembled both from sudden fear and from exertion, and listened to the dull metallic sound of chain mail on her arms as she did so. And then she looked down, knowing before she did that there would be spurs on her heels.
She swallowed, and she turned slowly to Gouvernail, feeling the whiteness of her face that had moments before been red, and where she imagined her cheeks stood out in livid brightness. She stood in a beam of light that fell from a broad glazed window which overlooked the overgrown moat, a row of which lit up the room she had just opened, and she looked at the very few motes of dust swirling before her and realized that in her hands she held, instead of her usual riding whip, a heavy coil of leather that felt dangerous even to her. She was only aware of the cascade of white flowers blooming around her ankles as they shriveled up and died away.
He was looking at her, tired but somehow unsurprised. "Lady," he said, with a little bow of his head as if to defer to her sudden acquisition of power, but the mildness was not sarcasm now, and she knew it, somehow.
She reached out to touch a final fading flower, then turned to look at the room in all its bright glory. It was long, almost a gallery, and instead of the chaotic heap of things that had been in every other store room, it stood tidy, organized: untouched and pristine, its walls lined with shelves containing chests and caskets. But her eye was drawn to the farthest end of the chamber, and she walked towards the incongruous object there with slow steps, feeling the strange weight of her new mantle as it dragged behind her.
Amidst tapestries and garlands and the rolled-up walls of silk pavilions, among the gilded furniture and drums and a wall hung with silver laurels and ivory saddles and golden rings wound with green ribbon, there stood an item of mundane purpose: a loom, she realized, the warp and weft still strung with silk that gleamed red in the slanting light, arranged beneath the same window she had looked on from outside. As she watched, one of the threads moved on its own with meticulous slowness across the machine, and she moved nearer, wondering if to do so would disturb some phantom weaver.
As she reached out, the threads seemed to be snipped by some unseen pair of scissors, and into her outstretched hand there fell a length of red silk ribbon. Unlike the red ribbon that heralded her as Garde, it was no simple affair, such as a peasant girl might use to bind her hair. It was elaborately worked in gilded threads, sporting white flowers like her own, and it seemed to waft the same fragrance when she lifted it to examine it more closely.
It looked, she realized numbly, like the sort of thing a queen would wear, instead. She closed her hand around it, and listened to the soft click of the loom continuing its slow, autonomous work.
"What is it?" she asked at last, towards Gouvernail, who was looking at her strangely.
"I do not know," he said. "It never did such a thing in my time. But perhaps before my time." And then, after a pause: "The Garde yields to you," he said cryptically, but perhaps not cryptically enough.
A long, long silence passed between them, and somehow she knew what he was about to do before he did it, and inwardly she longed to tell him not to: to stop him, before he made some gesture that neither of them could revoke.
But she was mute, and could only stand in dread of what he did: lifting his phantom arm towards her, as if to beckon her to tie it around his mail, as a Lady might who sent her Knight - the weapon she wielded - into the lists.
"This is what you wished, is it not?" he suggested with a strange gravity. To deny it would be to say aloud what they both knew: that he was no more a weapon to be wielded than that flimsy first red ribbon had been, but that he would never again grow into power.
"I can't," she said thickly, but she stepped towards him, and she pantomimed it as well she could, the knot pulled uselessly in on itself through the insubstantiality of his lifted arm and back into her hand.
They were silent as she cleared away the heavy chest that had blocked the door from the other side and lifted the latch, and stepped out into the evening sun of the bailey, where the crickets had already begun their noise, and where fat bees bumbled through the flowers crawling over the gatehouse. Somewhere in the distant part of the wood beyond the walls, a bird sang: a nightingale, she thought. They stood mute and listened to the sound of living things.
"Will you stay?" he asked at last, breaking the silence as his eyes wandered to the steps down to the chapel where she had made her bed and incurred his wrath not that long ago, and she shook her head. She had, in fact, been meaning to do exactly that, but found herself unable to face the idea, now.
"I won't bring guests next time," she said, and rather than feeling propitiating, it felt like extending an act of benevolence to someone in her power. She reached to give him her hand, as she always did, and somehow instinctively knew this time that rather than lift it to his lips, she should lower it, to where he knelt to pretend to take it. She sought for words, but none came, and she left with the ribbon still clutched in her hand.
