Liavek 7 Page 8

And the lost little boy—Without knowing how I knew it, I'd played a song his mother had courted to. Would she have stuck her head out of the house if I'd been playing anything else?

  But in front of my mother's house, I had stopped of my own volition. It had been I, not Iranda, who had first started walking down the Street of Shadows. The strings had helped find the little boy's mother, and had known what to do when I was trying to catch the attention of my own. The strings aided me. They did not control me.

  That left the old man who'd gotten into an argument with the fruit vendors. Plainly, he was still mad. So I played, and it was hideously out of tune. What more could strings do to provoke the fight the old man desired?

  I had the perfect legacy from Libonas the Fainthearted—strings that would always give the listeners exactly what they wanted.

  It was too late to catch Iranda. She would pay what Esculon demanded and return thinking she had news of utmost importance to tell me.

  So I went back to the room by the side door to wait.

  Dressed and warmed up, I sat calmly in a chair in the waiting room. My cittern rested comfortably in my lap like a much-loved pet. I was playing snatches of old ballads, fragments of songs I'd written, an occasional warmup exercise, and sometimes just running my fingers over the strings.

  My blessed, cursed, wonderful strings.

  Someone knocked twice, then burst in without waiting for my reply. It was Iranda, looking out of breath but happy. "You're safe," she exclaimed. "The only spell Esculon sold Libonas was one to make the strings please the listener. And you'll be doing that anyway, I expect!"

  "I worked it out just after you left," I said. "Iranda, did you ask Esculon why Libonas was dead?"

  "He said that when he met Libonas, the minstrel was set to die of unhappiness because of his inability to please his audiences. Esculon did everything a wizard could to make things better, but it didn't work. Apparently Libonas had other problems. Escalon also said not to worry about the strings. If even half the audience is friendly, you'll be fine. Or you can always pick one friend in the audience and play to her. Like me."

  "And if you join me on stage for two or three songs," I said, thinking out loud, "I can play to Thrae."

  "Stand up," Iranda said. "And get your cittern out of the way."

  I stood up, not knowing what to expect—

  Iranda kissed me.

  It was a shock; like accidentally grabbing the wrong end of a fireplace poker; like touching one of the stinging eels the fish markets sell.

  We let go, both gasping for breath. Then there was another knock on the door. Iranda opened it. It was Thrae.

  "Sorry to bother you," Thrae said. "But there's a woman at the front door to see you, Liramal. Says she's your mother."

  "I'd love to see her," I said. "After the concert."

  So the strings could claim one more small victory.

  It was time. Giving Iranda's hand one last squeeze—not for luck; for confidence—I walked briskly out onto the platform stage.

  And the audience greeted me with applause.

  "The Tale of the Stuffed Levar" by Jane Yolen

  OH, I WILL not bore you with the story of Andrazzi and her Shift Dreams, my lords, my ladies, she being the greatest ruler in living memory, always excepting our gracious Levar now on the throne. But every schoolchild knows of her: how she followed the awful Year of the Quick Levars in which a virtual alphabet chowder of Levars died one right after another, some of natural causes, some of unnatural causes, and some of magic.

  The tale I would spin you now, my Excellencies, is not of Andrazzi but of the Levar who immediately preceded her, Zzzozza the Terrified, who collapsed of a surfeit of bad dates in the middle of ticklish negotiations with Ka Zhir, only to be revived within minutes by his loving wife, the redoubtable Zadir, a woman of somewhat dubious background and strange tastes. Strange, that is, for a Liavekan and the wife of a Levar. Zzzozza the Terrified, who even though he was habitually tongue-tied and full of a variety of incapacitating tics, still managed to keep us out of a fearful war with Ka Zhir before expiring at last at the feet of his successor Andrazzi some two days after eating the poisoned dates.

  That, of course, is the story as we all know it, for it has been sung in such ballads as "Zzzozza and the Dates" and "When Levars Eat in Public." And no, my Magnificencies, you need not fear I shall sing them now. My tongue is for telling, not for warbling out of tune like some addlepated turtledove. Ballads have their place, and surely the ban on our Levars' public appearances at great feasts is as much due to the popularity of that latter ballad as Zzzozza's death itself. But the stories told in ballads are often changed to fit the meter. Poets have less regard for history than for rhyme.

  What I will tell you now is the real tale. It has been handed down father to son, father to son in my family since that fateful day of the dates. Our tongues have kept the memory alive. We hold the truth in our mouths. We know that truth because one of my uncles, many times removed, was intimately connected with the tale. His name was Ovar the Tinmaker, not because he made tin but because he could make a loud noise or din, and one of his young nephews had christened him that before the child's mouth could properly pronounce the word.

  Ovar was an entertainer of sorts, a professional din-maker as his sisters called him, a puppet master who could make wooden dolls speak, and a man who could balance oranges on his nose. A strange mixture of skills, but ones that would make him suitable for his role in the odd history I am about to relate. His ability as a performer left him little in demand, and because he had a wife and seventeen children—he had some talents a Levar might envy—all of whom desired to eat, he also owned a farm which lay in the shadow of the Silverspine. On that farm he grew dates. Yes, my Eminences, the very dates celebrated in song and story.

  I see you are interested, my Graces. It is a small tale, but mine own. None can tell it save I, for it belongs to our family and I—alas—am the last of our line, since no one in our family but Ovar of the tainted Dates ever had more than a single child thereafter. It was Andrazzi's express wish. And as I am the last and I have no child to whom I can pass on the story, it shall die if it is not told. So I will tell it to you for a coin. A small coin. A copper in the palm. A copper in each palm will suffice. I will take no dates in payment. As you can imagine, no one in my family has eaten dates since that fateful day.

  The story I tell happened during a fragile but interesting moment in the magnificent history of our land. Due to the year of change and changing rulers, Liavek's hold on the Sea of Luck was daily threatened. You know it well. Need I rehearse for you the horrible incursions by the pirates of Ka Zhir? They raped and pillaged without thought to the age, sex, or religious inclinations of their victims. They swore—and the few pitiful survivors of their raids attested to this—that they were without official sanction. But I have it on good authority, since one of my aunts many times removed had been pillaged and pillowed by the swine, that each captain sailed under a letter of mark from their king.

  So our Levar and their king negotiated a truce. But it was slow going, my Graciousnesses, for Levar after Levar had died in that terrible year and each time the ambassador had to be recalled and then returned to present his credentials in the proper way. By Zzzozza's turn, twenty-five such presentations had occurred in rapid succession, and the Zhir ambassador was exhausted.

  Besides, Zzzozza spent so much of his time being terrified (it took him half a day just to be able to look at his own reflection in the mirror, in this much the ballads are correct) that the ambassador had even longer to wait. But Zzzozza was our Levar, and so I touch upon his frailties no more.

  And so, the play of history unfolded. Zzzozza on his throne with his customary wide-eyed terrified look. His wife, the redoubtable Zadir, by his feet as she preferred not to watch his trembling lips and squinting eyes. His advisors on either side, urging action by wind or by war, depending upon their personal landholdings. The Zhir ambassador, a small man made even s
maller by his large guard, on the floor making his obeisances, hands to forehead. And entering from the kitchen, my uncle many times removed Ovar, balancing a plate of dates on his head. In those days dates were the coin of negotiation and the only thing Zzzozza was not terrified of, they being small, sweet, and immobile.

  Then Zzzozza held out his hand, Exultancies, a gesture fraught with fear. His hand trembled so that he spilled most of the dates upon the floor. Only a few landed in his hand. The rest he swept under the table with his foot, afraid, no doubt, that the ambassador might be offended by such clumsiness. However the dates were not the only thing under the Levar's table. His wife's three pet monkeys were there, she being a great collector of animals, both live and dead. The monkeys dined quickly upon the dates, in the manner of their kind, stuffing them into their mouths and swallowing in one swift motion. They subsequently went into loud convulsions, mercifully hidden from human sight by the vast white tablecloth and its intricate lace hem, and from hearing by the Levar's own distressed cries. He had, in his turn, eaten the few dates in his hand, turned the color of Tichenese mud, that strange brown shot through with veins of green and gold, uttered three sharp cries that were augmented by the monkeys' screams, and passed out.

  Recognizing her pets' voices, the redoubtable Zadir crept under the tablecloth and wept, but quietly. She was a woman used to being neither seen nor heard in the jungles where she gathered animals for her study.

  The ambassador still lay on the floor, being a stickler for proper procedure. Failures in protocol are punished severely in Ka Zhir. So when he heard strange sounds from the Levar's throne, the ambassador did not look up. Zzzozza was known to throw up at shadows, to blanch at whispers of wind. It would have been inappropriate in the extreme for the ambassador of Ka Zhir to watch the Liavekan Levar lose his lunch. All of this gave rise to the rumors later on that it was he who tried to poison Zzzozza. But—alas—it was just a case of bad dates.

  So only the Levar's closest advisors and my uncle many times removed Ovar, my Supremacies, saw the rictus of death beginning to spread the Levar's smile.

  Ringing the throne with their fevered presences, the advisors hurried him into his dressing room by the simple expedient of making a chair of their hands. They carried his body away with more hurry than honor. Stepping over the prostrate ambassador and his guards, the chief advisor said quickly. "His eminence Zzzozza is not happy with your obeisance. He will return in an hour to see if your limbs have been more suitably arranged."

  This delighted the ambassador. Such was the usual way things were handled in the court of Ka Zhir. It meant he had been noticed and that negotiations could now go forth properly. He spent the next hour twitching and manipulating his limbs into that most uncomfortable pattern, known in Ka Zhir as the Position of Broken Twigs.

  Now the redoubtable Zadir had not seen the retreat of her dying husband on the arms of his advisors for she was still busy under the table gathering up her rapidly stiffening pets. Crawling out from under the table with the monkeys in her arms, she stopped to wipe her eyes quickly with the lacy edge of the cloth. When she stood, she found herself in a hall deserted except for the groveling ambassador and his guards, all face down on the floor.

  Now Zadir did not hesitate for a moment. She knew it would take the ambassador at least an hour to compose himself. The Zhir were famous for such self-torture. They even had manuals on limb arrangement. She counted on that time. Being from a minor branch of the royal family that had fended for itself on the border of the Great Waste where her great-grandfather had been sent in partial exile for some infraction of court etiquette, Zadir was at her best in difficult situations. That was one of the reasons she had chosen to marry the unmarriageable Levar Zzzozza. All the other young women of royal blood had preferred to wait upon his demise—or to plan it, whichever seemed safest. But the redoubtable Zadir had chosen the most direct method—marriage. With one stipulation, which she got in writing. (Her great-grandfather had never put anything in writing, which led to his downfall.) She asked only that she be allowed to establish a royal zoological park and fill it with exotic beasts. Since it was the best, indeed the only offer Zzzozza had, his advisors took it, even though there had been rumors of a Zhir taint in Zadir's bloodlines.

  So what did the redoubtable Zadir do, my Pre-eminences? Well you may wonder. Shouldering her poor dead creatures, she strode from the room, thinking briefly about contacting a wizard to help her animate her pets and then deciding instead upon taxidermy, that being the latest of her obsessions.

  But as she passed her husband's rooms, she heard a strange hubbub. Knowing him to be quiet in the extreme—for he also had an advanced case of noise-aversion—she worried that he might be ill, thus affecting the passage of the treaty with Ka Zhir which she devoutly desired since some of the known world's most exotic animals roamed the Zhir hills: the Septillan Ape with its seven-fingered hands, the Blond Marmez which bore feathered young though it was a mammal, and the deadly but glorious Nightcaller or Ninjus whose whimsical song lured lizards and ladies to their deaths. So she hurried into his chamber to offer what assistance she could. And there she found him surrounded by his gabbling advisors and my uncle many times removed Ovar who was standing in the corner noisily wringing his hands for, in his consternation, he was throwing his voice into his fingertips as if they were tiny puppets.

  Now it took Zadir a long minute to realize that Zzzozza had, indeed, died, for he sat with his usual terrified expression, eyes rolled up till the whites showed, and his mouth uncomfortably ajar. But in that long minute, as Zzzozza had neither a tic nor a tremor, the redoubtable Zadir began to suspect something was horribly amiss. And when she purposely dropped one of her stiffened monkeys onto his lap and he did not scream, she knew.

  "The Levar is dead," she announced to the gesticulating advisors. Such was the authority in her voice, the men were silent at once. Even Ovar's wrangling hands were still.

  "What have you done?" Zadir asked. "Have you done anything?" Those being the two questions royal children are taught to ask.

  There were no answers from the advisors, only head shakes.

  The redoubtable Zadir shook her own head. "Men," she muttered, adding in Tichenese, "Zabidip na sta ne cazz, zabidip sta ne cazzua." Which, as you know my Ascendencies, means "Men, even when they are possible, men they are impossible." It does not translate well. And then Zadir issued a series of instructions which only in retrospect made sense.

  "Send for a doctor. Send for a wizard. Send for my filleting knife."

  Well, what could the advisors do? Until the royal doctor pronounced the Levar truly and eternally dead, Zadir was still his wife, not his widow. The widow they could safely ignore; the wife they had to obey.

  ''The doctor," said the first advisor, hurrying out the door.

  "A wizard," said another, hurrying after.

  "Your filleting knife?" asked the third, knowing the redoubtable Zadir as a fisherwoman of great renown and puzzling over the significance of his task.

  "I mean to stuff these while I wait," Zadir said, pointing to her erstwhile pets. "And if you do not bring me my knife at once, I shall consider stuffing you as well."

  Remembering the reason Zadir's great-grandfather had been exiled to the border of the Waste, the advisor hurried from the room.

  Ovar alone did not move.

  •

  The wizard arrived shortly after. He was an unprepossessing sort who lived on the very edge of Wizard's Row, and not for very long either. It being a holiday, his house had been the only one visible at the time and the advisor had had no choice but to enlist him, unprepossessing as he was, in the service of the Levar. Being a patriotic sort, he came at once but he shook his head dismally when he heard Zadir's request.

  "Actually," he said, cracking his knuckles and chewing on the right side of his pencil-thin, drooping gray mustache, "re-animation is way beyond my skills." For a moment he stroked the left side of his mustache, but it was already in tatter
s. "I deal mostly in water spells. In fact, I deal entirely in water spells. Wine into water. Water into wine. That sort of thing."

  "How are you at fishes?" asked Zadir suddenly.

  "Pretty good, actually," the wizard said. "Tench, carp, pike, and trout are my specialties now, though I did my independent studies on the goby, which is the world's smallest fish, and …" He paused, sensing Zadir's disapproval.

  "But no humans?"

  "Sadly, no, your Eminence." He cracked a few more knuckles and started in again on the mustache.

  Just then the doctor arrived. It was not the royal doctor. He had been called away to attend a rather messy business with one of the Dashforths (whose heirs would carry the title Count Dashif for just such messy businesses in the years to come). This one was a minor doctor who moved in a competent bustling manner to disguise the fact that he was, actually, incompetent in all but the most ordinary of diagnoses. He held onto Zzzozza's wrist and examined his bulging white eyes.

  "He does not look well," the doctor pronounced at last.

  "He looks dead," said Zadir.

  "Maybe not," said the doctor. "We shall have to test further. One does not pronounce a Levar dead without proof. If I were wrong, he would have my head."

  The advisors began gabbling again and the wizard made himself disappear, or at least managed to make his right side disappear. The left side, including the tattered mustache, was still visible. He was not, as he himself stated, good with humans at all. And my uncle many times removed Ovar in his great agitation began to throw his voice all over the room: whimpering from the candle sconce, whining from the Tichen carpet, slobbering from the mouths of all three dead apes.

  The redoubtable Zadir was the only one who noticed. "Who is doing that?" she asked.

  "Doing what?" they all replied before lapsing into hysteria again.

  However Zadir had noticed that Ovar had been the only one whose lips had not moved. "You!" she said, pointing her index finger.