Pryn suddenly laughed. ‘But I’ve heard this story before! Or one just like it — only it was about grains of sand piled on the squares of a gaming board. I don’t remember how many squares there were, but by the end, I remember, all the sand in the world was used up. Am I right about the ending? At the end of the twenty-three servants, she had all the money in the world…?’
Norema smiled. ‘She certainly had all the money in the monastery. And at that particular time, all the money in the monastery was pretty much all the money in Nevèrÿon.’
‘That is an old story. I know, because I’ve heard it before. The version about the sand grains, that is.’
‘That part of the story is old. But there are some new parts too. For example, after she had killed all her servants, the beautiful young queen felt very differently about herself.’
Pryn frowned. ‘How do you mean?’
‘Well,’ Norema said, ‘for one thing, in less than a year she had stabbed, strangled, bashed out the brains, poisoned, beheaded, and done even worse to twenty-two of her most faithful bondsmen and bondswomen, who were also the closest things she’d had to friends. After that she began to act very strangely and behave quite oddly. On and off, she behaved oddly the rest of her life — even for a queen. And in those days queens were expected to be eccentric. Often, after that, she was known as Mad Olin.’
‘I thought you said there were twenty-three servants.’
‘There were. But the last survived. He was not only a servant, but also her maternal uncle — though, alas, I can’t remember his family name. And there’re reasons to remember it, too, but for the life of me I can’t recall what they are. Anyway. Years before, he had fallen on bad times and had indentured himself to the queen’s mother, which was why he was with Olin in the first place. But he had always set himself apart. Along about the queen’s murderings of the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first servants — all particularly gruesome — the evil priests were, financially speaking, in rather bad shape. Olin was by then quite well off — though mentally she was a bit shaky. Her maternal uncle, who, like the first servant, was also something of a magician, had, with the help of the rest of the family, managed to engineer an escape for the queen. It took a good deal of the money; and Olin took the rest — to hide lest the wicked priests manage to trick it back, even as her first wise and faithful servant had tricked it from the priests.’ Norema sighed. ‘Raven and I once visited that monastery — it’s still there today. And there are still priests — at least there were when we went. Now, I’m not sure. Anyway, you could certainly tell that the place had seen better times. Clearly they hadn’t gotten their money back.’
‘Are the priests still wicked?’
Reddish brows lowered. ‘Well, I doubt if either my friend or I would ever stop there again — unless we absolutely had to.’
‘What about Olin’s escape?’
‘Ah, the exciting part!’ Norema said. ‘Her uncle spirited her away from the monastery in the middle of the night, with the money in a caravan of six great wagons, each pulled by six horses. It was a lot of money, you see, and took more than one wagon to carry. Also, there was a lot more than gold coins in it by now — jewels and iron trinkets and all sorts of precious and semi-precious stones. The uncle took her to his family home, there in the south, and that evening he went with her up into a tall tower — at least that’s how one version of the story goes. In another version, he took her up on a high rocky slope — ’
‘Shouldn’t you choose one or the other for the sake of the telling?’ Pryn asked.
‘For the sake of the story,’ Norema answered, ‘I tell both and let my hearer make her choices.’
‘Oh,’ Pryn said.
‘In the stone chamber at the tower top — or in the rocky cell at the top of the rocky slope — the uncle began to read her the sequence by which the gold coins had come to her: one, two, four, eight, sixteen, thirty-two, sixty-four, one hundred twenty-eight, two hundred fifty-six, five hundred twelve, one thousand twenty-four, two thousand forty-eight, four thousand ninety-six — ’
I see how fast it goes up!’ Pryn exclaimed. ‘That’s just halfway through them, and it’s already almost five thousand gold pieces. Two more, and it’ll be over twenty thousand. Twenty thousand gold pieces must be close to all the money in the world!’
‘That’s what you see.’ Norema smiled. ‘What the young queen saw, however, was a city.’
Pryn blinked.
Norema said: ‘The queen blinked.’
‘What city?’ Pryn asked. ‘Where did she see it?’
‘Precisely what the queen wondered too — for she blinked again…It was gone! Through the stone columns at the stone rail, the queen looked down from the tower — or down to the foot of the slope — and saw only some marshy water, an open inlet, rippling out between the hills to the sea. But the queen had seen a city, there among the ripples, as clearly as she now saw the hills on either side of the inlet, or, indeed, as clearly as she saw the swampy growths that splotched the waters where they came in to the land. When she told her uncle what she had seen, immediately he stopped reading the numbers and showed her all sorts of magic wonders, including a circle full of different stars, which he gave her to keep. Then he took her down from the tower — or down from the rocks — to a great dinner that had been prepared for her, where they talked of more magic things. Then he did something terrible.’
‘What?’ Pryn asked. ‘So far, this story sounds more confusing than exciting.’
To the proper hearer,’ Norema said, ‘precisely what seems confusing will be the exciting part. When the queen came back from a stroll in the garden between courses, the uncle gave her a goblet of poison, which she, unknowing, drank.’
Norema was silent a long time.
Finally Pryn asked: ‘Was that the end of the queen? I’m sure her uncle probably wanted the money for himself. This doesn’t sound like a real story to me. What about the “circle of different stars?” I don’t even know what that is! I mean, it doesn’t seem like a story, because it…doesn’t really end.’
‘It certainly doesn’t end there,’ Norema said. ‘It goes on for quite a while, yet. But that always seemed to me an exciting place for a pause.’
‘What did happen, then?’
‘See, you are caught up in the excitement, the action, the suspense! You want to know the outcome — I think it’s very important to alert your listeners to the progress of their own reactions. I can foresee a time, after lots more tales have been told, when that won’t be necessary. But for now it’s a must. Well, the poison didn’t kill the queen. It put her in a trance — and when she woke, if indeed she wasn’t dreaming, she was on a rocky ledge. It was night, and as she pushed herself up on her hands and looked around, she saw she was lying between two white stones, one taller than the other — now here, again, there’s another version that says the queen woke up in a boat which sailed in to a strange shore that morning, and on the shore she found the white stones — one higher than the other; at noon on the longest day of summer, this version says, one stone casts a shadow three times as long as — ’