A.R.Yngve
DARC AGES:
City Of Masks
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Chapter 7
Meanwhile in Damon City, Librian worried.
He met with Dohan and his wife Meijji, as they were playing chess in the great hall. Meijji was visibly pregnant with their first child. Dohan's mother and little sister watched the game and offered advice.
Next to the chessboard lay a map of the world; discarded chess pieces had been placed out on those cities the plague vaccine had reached. No piece had yet been placed on the boot-shaped Italican peninsula.
"Awonso has not transmitted any messages from Vanitia, my lord. If they need assistance, how soon can you send a relief force?"
Dohan looked up from the chessboard, and scratched his short red beard. "All our forces are tied up elsewhere, old friend. And we are desperately short of aircraft. A relief force by sea would take, at best, a month to arrange and ship across. And now that the lord of Kibralta has proved to be a deceiver, we have lost the best port that connected us with Italica. So I fear I can do nothing for a while, until our relations with Kibralta improve."
Librian was on the verge of tears. "What do I tell his parents?"
Meijji, a brown-skinned beauty whose curves were ripe with motherhood, got out of her chair and grasped Librian's hand. "He is like a son to you."
"He was going to take my place, and I am old. I taught him all I know." Librian's voice broke, and he removed his spectacles to wipe his eyes.
"I am sure that with your learning, Awonso will pull through," Meijji reassured him.
"And what about your brother Threo?" Dohan asked her, his forehead wrinkling. "How will he fare?"
Meijji smiled. "As long as he does not put his foot in his mouth as usual, he'll come out without a scratch. If I learned anything from growing up in a family of physicians, it's this: everyone needs a doctor - and a doctor gains everyone's confidence. It is a blessing and a curse. Awonso could not ask for a better traveling partner."
Librian thanked her, and left. Eveli pointed to the chessboard and said eagerly: "Move the knight and you trap her king!"
Dohan leaned closer to the board and chuckled. "You must be working for Meijji, little sister! Her two towers guard the opening perfectly."
"Stop calling me 'little' sister." Eveli dashed from her chair and stormed out of the hall.
Dohan's mother fanned herself and said: "The young form of the Goddess is awakening early in her. You should send her to another city and let complete her education there."
Dohan nodded. "Yes, I know. I have been too busy, but I promise I shall arrange a stay for her outside."
"Where to?" asked Meijji.
Dohan moved a knight closer to Meijji's queen. "Somewhere exciting, exotic..." Glancing at the map of Italica, he added: "Perhaps I should have let her go to Vanitia. In the company of Awonso and Kensaburé she ought to be safe and entertained..."
The next morning, after an uneasy sleep disturbed by bad dreams, Awonso stirred awake and rushed into the bathroom. The palace had indoor plumbing, not as advanced as in Damon City, but good enough.
When he came out of the bathroom, pale and gloomy, he recalled the coal tablets that Threo had forgotten to give him yesterday. He found his clothes laundered and dried on the table outside his door, dressed quickly and rushed to Threo's room.
One look at Awonso's drawn face reminded Threo. "Ah yes, your coal tablet. I forgot." Threo, wearing the shirt he had slept in, let Awonso inside and picked up his bundle of laundered clothes by the door. "It lies on my table. You can wash it down with that wine they gave me... I don't drink wine when I work."
When Awonso had swallowed his tablet with a few gulps of wine, he went over the balcony to look at the harbor. He stared at the anchored ships and passing sails in the distance, and grew anxious.
"I can't see the Blackwhale!"
"Let me show you," Threo said impatiently, and walked out on the balcony while he buttoned his jacket. "It's hard to see, behind that lighthouse and the statues... behind..." He went pale. "Sons of bitches! It's gone! That bastard captain left us stranded without a warning!"
"I thought no ships could come or leave without permission?"
They looked at each other.
"Sarastos."
"Berluchos."
"No matter who, they let the captain run for it - perhaps they paid him off," Awonso said. "Now we're in trouble. Master Librian must be worried sick... and my parents..."
He started and climbed over to the adjacent balcony, and returned with the radio set in its glass casing. "Still works. I shall try to send a message that we are alive, perhaps it gets through the jamming radiation. I have a distress code, but he told me to save it as a last resort."
"Our transport abandoned us. How can we not be in distress?"
"It is also the signal that we are about to be killed by an enemy," Awonso explained. "That could start a war."
Threo clenched and unclenched his fists restlessly. "Tell them we are well for now. I'll go tell our noble-noses the bad news."
He nearly forgot to put on the mask when he left. Servants were walking past him in the corridors, hard at work while wearing crude plain masks, but no one else was up and about.
He knocked at Okono's door. Her robot opened. Its oversized, blinking doll eyes looked up at him, as if pleading.
"Will you be my friend?" The voice, still oddly modulated, sounded somewhat closer to human than before. Threo wondered what sort of unholy experiments Okono were doing. He did not like robots, any robots.
"Let me in."
The robot blocked the way. "Lady Okono is not here," Kiti-Mo said. "She told me to guard this room and not allow anyone inside until I received further orders. She told me she went away with Lord Berluchos."
"What??"
"Lady Okono is not here. She told me to guard this room..."
Threo ran to a masked servant and demanded to see Berluchos. The frightened servant understood the name and escorted him to the other side of the great hall, to the double-doors of Berluchos's rooms.
Two skull-masked guards stepped out in front of Threo. Also the guards wore large clothes which covered arms and legs, except they were made of coarser fabric.
"Is Lady Okono in there?" The guards shook their heads. "Have you seen her bodyguard? Large, bald fellow, doesn't say much?"
The guards shrugged. Threo took a deep breath and composed himself. Buchu would protect her. He started to walk back toward the opposite side of the palace when a small, high-pitched voice made him stop.
"Hey! You! Doctor." Threo turned around and saw a dwarf he had not met before. It did not shock him - he had seen one on his home island once - but this dwarf dressed like a nobleman and did not wear a mask.
The little man stood no taller than Threo's waist, and peeked out from a doorway. "Come in. Hurry!"
The guards saw the dwarf, and nodded to him like they knew him. One of them said something derisive about the dwarf, and both guards laughed.
Threo went into the room. The dwarf reached up and locked the door behind them.
"Do you know me?" the dwarf asked, looking up at Threo with a perfectly serious face. He must have been around forty years old, perhaps more.
"No. Who in the name of Setan-Klaws are you?"
He shrugged: "The jester. There is one in every court, or so I hear."
"You speak my tongue rather well."
"I'm a quick learn." The dwarf trundled over to a very short table, poured himself some wine from a teacup, and took a sip. Everything in this room had been shortened or lowered for his convenience: the chairs, the bed, the furniture and the several mirrors on the walls. A single electric arc-light flickered inside a glass lampshade shaped like a fish.
Whoever he might be, the dwarf was important enough to get his own electricity. With great speed he jumped on a chair and climbed a table to face Threo. "Are there any people like me where you come from?"
"Well, yes... a few."
"And have they got families... children?"
"It varies. Some cities, I hear, follow the old strict genetic laws and forbid anyone with a deformity to have children. The laws are a remnant from the great wars. Where I come from, I saw a dwarf who was married twice. The women used to call him..."
He paused; they had used a rather obscene name referring to the dwarf's virility, but Kap Verita had always had a shortage of men. "Why do you ask?"
"Because I want out." He stared at Threo with sincere desperation, yet his voice was perfectly calm. "I cannot stand this place. I am the only one here who is allowed to show myself in public wearing my real face. Everyone stares at me, they mock me... you cannot imagine what the children say, what they do. In my face they see everything they hide from each other. The courtiers love to have me around to look down on. I want to leave, but I was born here. I have nowhere to go."
"Looks like you're doing pretty well." Threo indicated the luxurious trappings of the room with a wave of the hand. "Now please answer some questions of mine. Do you believe the honesty of my intent? That I am a real physician, sent here to vaccinate your people and make them... or their offspring... immune to the Plague?"
Again the dwarf shrugged: "You must be for real. No one would be so insane as to lie that much and get away with it. They seem friendly now, don't they? If they suspected you knew their dirty secret, you would disappear..." He snapped his little fingers. "Like that."
Threo swallowed. "You're a man with nothing to lose. Can I trust you with a dangerous question?"
"Only if it were dangerous for me to betray you."
Threo's hands trembled a little, and his heart beat faster; if he had misjudged the dwarf, his question might doom them all.
"Is the Plague in this city... now? We have taken our vaccine, I and my friends are all immune. But what about you? Is it too late for you to accept the cure?"
The dwarf fiddled with his fingers, absentmindedly, as if he were juggling facts in his mind. He seemed to possess an extraordinary intelligence.
Then he put his hands together and said: "I honestly do not know. I have tried to learn as much as I could from the city's libraries, and from the traders who sail by. But the city lord keeps me from leaving. He needs me too much. All I know is that the court and the citizens suffer from a disfiguring disease. And it has not affected me yet. How could it be the Plague, if I'm not sick? Where are the lumps on my face? Where are my deformed arms? Do you see two heads on these shoulders, an exposed brain under a thin membrane, a nostril large enough to push a fist into...?"
Threo shuddered. It had not been a hallucination. The dwarf knew the secret of Lord Berluchos. Do not give in to fear, he told himself. It won't help anyone. You can help only if you take one step away from your emotions, as your father taught you.
"I see no marks of the Plague on you. But to be safe, I can give you the cure now, and you will be safe for the foreseeable future. And perhaps we can smuggle you out of here. What have you got to lose?"
"Everything." The dwarf shrugged. "I'll do it."
Threo had to measure a dose of vaccine meant for a child. The dwarf watched the needle sink in without flinching. His indifference to pain reminded Threo of Okono, and he became anxious to see her. He quickly cleaned and sealed the pinprick wound with his healing powder and laser-pen, and packed his bag.
"Have you seen Lady Okono? She was not in her room this morning."
The dwarf frowned and climbed down from the table. "I think I saw her in..." He corrected himself. "I heard she was seen in the palace gardens with Lord Berluchos last night. He did not come back to his room. Sometimes he sleeps away from his wife, if you know what I mean."
"And Kensaburé?"
"Who?" He made an innocent face, but perhaps he was lying. "Very large man, blond, dresses in checkered blue, looks like he could break people in half?"
Threo nodded. "That's him."
"Gradischa took him to her room down the hall. I did not see him leave."
"I must go. Thank you, whoever you... who are you?"
The dwarf smiled enigmatically up at him. "I am an island."
"We must talk again soon."
Threo felt a twinge of sympathy for the lonely dwarf, but had to leave quickly. He found the door leading to the gardens, and ran out in an enclosed grove of overgrown, unkempt hedges. It had once been a neatly kept maze, but now it resembled a piece of wilderness - where scattered, moss-covered statues tried to find their way out.
The ground was still moist from yesterday's rains and he could follow the footprints on the muddy garden path, to a bench.
A figure lay there on a stone bench under a raised parasol, dressed in red and white, black hair disheveled, her face pale as a corpse... he rushed up to her and realized it was the mask; the rain had washed the rouge off its cheeks.
Threo checked her pulse; it was slow but steady. He tried to prop her up into an upright position, and she stirred. Filled with panic, she flailed her arms and moaned.
"It's me! Okono. It's me." He pulled up his mask, then hers, and saw her lovely, frightened eyes. Briefly, they felt an overwhelming attraction. Okono put her mask back on and embraced Threo, burying her face in the nape of his neck.
"Damn these devious Vanitians! I thought Buchu would protect me, but they put some drug in his food... he fell asleep and they carried him off to my room while the city lord led me here... I think they drugged me too, but I did not drink enough... I sent away Kiti-Mo because I feared the rain would damage her. And then Berluchos tried to... to... he was drunk. Sarastos tried to warn me! I thought he was trying to flirt, but it was a warning!"
Threo held her tightly, and his physician's oath was all but forgotten: he felt like strangling Berluchos... or whoever had impersonated him last night. He dared not ask what had happened, but held Okono as she sobbed.
"The drug confused me. But he did not succeed in dishonoring me... I tried to tear off his mask. It was fastened by a chain, so he thought I could not get it off him, he laughed at me... then I pulled the knife from my sleeve, and cut the chain. For a moment I saw his real face. He screamed and ran. I could not go back to my room with the shame. I sat here all night and tried to gather the courage to commit suicide. But I failed..."
She had another sobbing fit and Threo spotted her knife lying in the tall grass, where it had slipped from her hand.
He looked around him and gently pulled away her mask, despite her feeble protests, then his own. He put his face close enough that their noses almost touched.
"Listen to me, Okono. You have nothing to be ashamed of. I don't care about what your family thinks, or their twisted sense of honor. I don't care about your mask of conventions. I hate masks. Your real face is beautiful. You are beautiful. Yes, I love you and I don't care what you have done or where you come from. If you should kill yourself I would die inside. Leave your family. Come live with me."
She breathed slower, and her tears ceased. Then she put her slender hands around his bronze-colored cheeks and kissed him softly, slowly at first, then faster, and he responded with a passion equal to hers. They stopped only a minute later, holding each other close, and sat down to watch the passing clouds above.
"His face," Threo asked. "How badly deformed was it? Did he have an unnaturally large nose?"
Okono shook her head and pulled stray black hair out of her face. "No... nothing like that. He was not handsome, but nothing was wrong with his face."
"No blemishes? No tattoo on his forehead, the shape of a double spiral? Leper tribes are known to have those."
"He was not a Leper, as far as I could see. But he was terrified of having his face exposed."
Threo pushed his fists together. "Last night I saw someone who might have been him, but who was deformed. The more I learn about Vanitia, the less I understand. A man who is not a Leper but acts like he is one. A man who may be a Leper, but pretends to be that other man. And a dwarf who..." He gaped. "I see. The dwarf! Sarastos is the dwarf! That's why Sarastos moved in such an odd manner. He must be walking on a pair of stilts... unless there was a second dwarf underneath him..."
Okono opened her mouth to speak, but Threo urged her to wait. He put their masks back on, took her by the hand, and they headed back to their quarters.
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DARC AGES (c)A.R.Yngve 1995, 2000, 2004, 2006. All rights reserved. May not be copied without permission.
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