“The mountains.”
“The mountains come?”
“The worlds turn.” Nodding now as if in affirmation. “The mountains.”
She did not speak again for a time and thought of the old woman whose name now escaped her and who was gone these long years, but she saw her here, in this old man and the only words he now knew. And when the hours had fled by he lay down and slept and she watched him sleep and the light from above moved through the dust as it floated in the air and then he woke and all was returned and he could speak as he once had.
When she asked him of the mountains and the world and he who was coming, he had no recollection of any of it.
He climbed the next morning the ladder of brick and stone and stood looking out the top for a time and she asked him what he saw and he told her it was a street. Brick and mud and across it the rising wall of some building unknown. Then he leaned forward and put his head and shoulders slowly through the hole, those shoulders grinding in the dirt and mud but this time at last the dirt and mud not of this place. Instead the mud of that road with above it open air and that air covering all the world and when he came back down he was grinning madly and his eyes very wide.
“You'll fit,” he said.
“Did you see anything?”
“Nothing.” Nodding emphatically and then sitting down beside her and looking at her. “It's a little street. I don't know where it goes.”
She thought she did but she could not be sure. “What was on the wall?”
“On the wall?”
“Signs, letters, ivy. Anything so I can find it again.”
“Ah.” He closed his eyes for a long moment, then nodded once more. “Part way up there is a window. It has shutters that are brown and look like a bat's wings. Something is written above it but I haven't been able to read in years.” Grinning as if that news was some enchanting thing saved until now when life was light and easy. “But it was written in white.”
Bat wings and white letters. She looked up at the ladder to salvation and licked her lips and found them as always slightly coated in the dust of the room and thought she tasted in it perhaps the dust of the world and what it meant. Dust blown on that long-carrying wind from the Island Kingdoms or down from the mountains or from the long gray desert to the east where the red stones rose from that colorless expanse like spires and creatures skittering in the night moved between the stones and called to a forlorn and pale moon.
“I'll find it,” she said.
“Then what'll we do? About your chains.”
“We'll take them off is what we'll do.” It was her turn now to grin.
“When are you going?”
“After the next time he calls me,” she said. “Once I know where to go.”
It was not as long waiting as it could have been.
She stood for the last time on the wall and looked out at the land. He was with her now but a mood had come on him like some storm and he was not speaking to her. Dressed all in black with his shirt white and an iron sword on his hip and looking like some relic here so far from battle but she did not tell him that and only looked.
They'd met with two lords who were fighting over land. One portly and rich and the other tall and poor and both claiming some vineyard and he had not listened as they spoke but had sat brooding and when they were done she had said that the deed must be produced and neither could and she'd sent someone to check but knew already that neither had a claim to it at all.
He had not spoken upon their arrival or departure and she had stood there and let them loose to tell of a queen who still ruled and the appearance intact.
Below them the buildings spread out from the castle to the south and east and in front the orchards. But it was to the city that she turned her eyes. Short buildings even near the wall for no building was allowed to stand over two stories there lest it be taken and used as a siege tower and they then grew taller as they moved away before descending once more. Toward the riverfront and the docks and the rattle of chains and the creak of rope.
She thought she knew where the dungeons sat buried in filth and perhaps knew the orientation of the wall and she looked and did not see the bat's wings nor the writing and was standing thinking through the map in her head when he finally spoke.
“We're nothing,” he said.
She did not want to look at him but she knew she must, especially now, and so she did. Him staring out across the field and not seeing her and the clouds moving in his eyes. “What do you mean?”
“You know what I mean.”
“You can say that, but I don't.” She regretted it as she said it, but he only scowled and didn't move to strike her.
“You know what we were. Now look at us. We're nothing.”
“We're at peace,” she said. “We're prosperous. What else do you want?”
“You call this prosperous?”
“It's enough.”
He leaned forward off the wall then and put his hand on the hilt of the sword and for one moment she thought he meant to draw it but he did not. He stood with his hand on it. “In the Island Kingdoms there is more gold than can fit on a fleet of galleys. In Dalimar they're mining diamonds from the mountains and piling them so high in carts the horses can't pull them. On the south sea the Tungisian fleet has ranged to the end of the world and come back with stories of another land where the men are ten feet tall and the land is beyond measure. And what do we have? Fields, timber, orchards. Nothing.”
“You call this nothing?”
Then he smiled and it was slow and perhaps worse than his eyes. “No,” he said. “You're right, it's not nothing.” Looking out over those long fields and the villages and cities in the plains and the rising mountains with towns of their own. “I have men.”
“You don't want war.”
He stepped toward her with hard eyes and was so close she could smell him and she did not flinch but it took all that was in her.
“Don't I?”
“You don't remember war. I do. You don't want it.”
But then he was done with her and she saw what was moving in his mind and behind those eyes and it made him care not even for her insolence and she thought she could have told him he was a fool and a coward and even then he wouldn't have struck her. For he was elsewhere and had what he wanted from her and now there was more he wanted.
“Not all at once,” he said. “Not all at once.”
He went to the battlements and looked out and they were silent again and she thought of asking him and then thought the hell with it and walked around the wall. Tracing these steps in which guards clad in iron strode and where other men had sometimes stood screaming while archers rained upon those below a swift and terrible death. She did not look back at him and he did not say anything and one of the guards came out from a little wooden door on the inside wall and followed her and he also did not speak, a silent wraith whose only sound was that of his boots on the stone.
She walked and kept her eyes forward and even so all she could think of were his words and the war.
Waking once beside the river in the small cloth tent and looking out and thinking the sunrise on the water was red, so red, and then going down to the bank and all the little stones awash in blood and it rolling in the current.
Running another time with the smoke in her lungs and a sword in her hand, the heft and weight of it, the blade broken half a meter up and still a splintered sword better than none and behind her a sound like all the world ending. In truth the pounding of the horses as they came down on the town. She had not looked and had never seen the horses but had heard them and smelled their sweat like salt on the air.