Terroir

The queen was throwing a party. She had grown tired of looking for solutions, hiring all manner of sorcerers and witches and architects, none of whom could help, and so now she was spending the last fistfuls of the realm’s coffers on a lavish celebration. A week before the festivities, her guards stopped a would-be assassin from ending her life. He had dressed as a guard himself, and carried a hollowed-out reed in one sleeve and a poisoned dart in the other. He got as far as firing the dart when Meltock West, the queen’s honored protector and provider of sexual services, twisted himself into the blowdart’s path and took it in the neck. West died within minutes, black foam dribbling out his mouth. The assassin had been executed in the traditional fashion: a public disembowelment. The only attendees were the executioner, the royal guard, a handful of slaves, two commoners with a mangy dog, and the queen herself.

The first order of party planning had been to relocate the wine racks to the ground floor, where they replaced a parlor that had previously been used for smoking tutroot, a practice that the queen detested. 

The guests began to arrive several days in advance. Most of them had the same shameful, wet-cat look that had become so pervasive throughout the realm, their eyes darting about as they spoke even to the queen. Throughout the planet, even, if the queen’s last emissaries from Offtish were any indication. The Island States were gone altogether, as far as we knew. The guests brought relatively little with them: a week’s clothing, some regional delicacies. During her early years on the throne her party guests would come with entire caravans carrying expensive gifts, like horses and fine clothing and highly skilled prisoners. Now they came only with the smallest trains, on boats made of glossy wood or on horseback through the Queen’s Mountains. Some brought their families, or their lovers for whom they’d abandoned their families, or beloved pets. They slept in the Ivy Castle’s lavish guest rooms, brightly colored and packed with cushions and blankets and kept absolutely as dry as possible by the queen’s slaves.

The queen no longer set foot outdoors. She also no longer bathed. She drank water only when she grew dizzy, and even then she forced it down in great swigging gulps as if she were trying to get drunk off it. I once swept the remains of a glass that she’d drank half the water from and then hurled at the floor. When the realm’s religious leaders came to her two months before the party to proclaim that the Divine was sick, that she must change her administration’s course, redistribute the wealth and properly allocate resources to the people and free her slaves and perhaps then the flooding would stop, she’d had them strapped to weights and dropped into the rising waters.

Her guest’s ships bobbed in the harbor, streaks of silver and gold in their hulls that gleamed dully through the mist. 

The Council of Advisors gathered for the last time the night before the party. The mathematician presented her latest calculations: technically, the rains could continue forever- but eventually, the flooding would have to plateau. There was only so much untapped moisture in the ice flows that had melted in the humidity, in the bodies of the masses drowning and giving their life force back to the clouds. And if the rains ever stopped, the waters would recede, but the face of the planet would be changed forever. The queen stopped her with a raised hand.

“I wish to discuss the party,” she said. The gamekeeper stepped forward to detail the stock he’d prepared for the evening.

We rose early in the morning to prepare the Ivy Castle. We shared breakfast together in our quarters, which were damp and moldy and flooded with ankle-high water. We cooked together, beans and quick-bread and boiled shoots of crawler-reed that we’d purchased from the nearby village with our collective monthly allowance, and we joked and smiled and kissed one another on the head. I placed my hand on Freckle’s thigh and left it there for the duration, squeezing him in periodic excitement. When we detached to complete our tasks for the day, we kissed passionately, our tongues and beards connecting, tangling, separating. Freckle smiled and crept away, his feet splashing gently on the floor, heading off to arrange flowers in the ballroom. I went upstairs in search of the gamekeeper, who held the key to the animal pens.

The gamekeeper woke before dawn each morning to watch the day begin on the third floor veranda. In the past, this meant watching the sun rise. Now, it meant watching the seeping gray darkness go violet, then a sickly green color. When I arrived, he was eating dried fruit from a pouch.

“You’re late,” the gamekeeper said. He sighed. “I suppose it doesn’t really matter.” He handed me the key, an ostentatious piece of brass molded to look like an antlered deer’s head. “What do you think? Is there any talk among your lot about what all this means?”

“I could lose my tongue for answering that question,” I said.

The gamekeeper looked me up and down, then shrugged. “I guess the reason doesn’t really matter. It’s happening,” he said.

I remembered when I’d first been selected to assist the gamekeeper. The man had been cruel and boisterous; he made jokes to me in private about forcing the queen to suck on his toes, about burning the skin of her breasts with the hot embers from his tutroot pipe. These comments especially disturbed me, since I often tied Freckle up and beat him with a paddle, an activity that felt more like healing than it did like pain when all was said and done, when I held Freckle in my arms on our scratchy cot and kissed his eyelids and cooed softly until we drifted off to sleep, knowing that together we could hold something dangerous and charged between us and better love each other for it. Hearing the gamekeeper joke about twisting the same kind of intimacy into rape made me want to throw him from the veranda. I had seen him torture my friends and family. 

But now the gamekeeper was changed: he did not joke anymore, about anything. When he spoke about the queen, his eyes shifted and his hands slipped into the pockets of his fur coat. He smoked more and drank constantly and never got drunk. He let the rain on the veranda soak him thoroughly every morning, never bothering with an umbrella, and wandered around the castle, soggy, drinking from pilfered jars of spiced fluck and re-arranging furniture. The whites of his eyes were turning yellow. He turned away from me to cling to the railing, which I took as my cue to leave. 

I wanted to present a strong sense of normality that day, but I grew bold in the energy buzzing about the grounds. I looked nobles in the eye, and when they turned to look again I was gone, through doorways and down halls and up staircases. I entered the animal pens, a giant, hay-filled stable inside the castle itself, creatures crammed in until they could not move, living in each other’s shit and piss. The different species were divided by three-meter high fences. There were deer, horned throg, and prairie cats. In preparation for the party I was meant to drug the prairie cats and the horned throg; by the time the party came around, they’d be recovering from their fits of drowsiness. They would be able to run and even possibly fight, but with a decidedly sluggish quality. The deer I was meant to leave alone, since they presented no real threat of physical harm. On an impulse, I slipped the bags of powder into my boots and filled the animal troughs with unadulterated table scraps from the previous evening’s supper, dropped off outside the pens by the kitchen slaves. For one day in that castle I resolved not to fear retribution.

I hung around in the animal pens for an hour or so, scooping manure into a wheelbarrow. When that was done (and after I had wasted another twenty minutes or so doing nothing in particular), I took the powder out of my boots and poured it into the manure. I covered the wheelbarrow with a tarp and exited the animal pens. I wheeled down the corridors of the east wing, the utilitarian side of the Ivy Castle, and out a backdoor into the waste yard, where I dumped the manure out among the dead flowers and ever-growing piles of discarded junk. I ducked inside quickly before I could get too wet. The animal pens were my only task from the gamekeeper until the party began, so I was meant to find one of the slave minders in search of my next assignment. I deliberately took a path that brought me past the makeshift wine cellar. Two royal guards stood by the door, the butt-ends of their bronze tridents stabilized on the floor. We were under strict orders not to enter, as the queen and several of the higher ranking visiting nobles would be spending the day inside. 

To this day, I don’t understand how they thought they were keeping us from the truth. Willful denial, perhaps. I wonder if they truly thought we were stupid, as if because we’d lived among their wartime enemies they genuinely thought of us as subhuman or somehow different from anyone born within the boundaries of their own political state. I wonder if they thought we were stupid because our eyes had different shapes from theirs, our skin a different shade. Perhaps they didn’t care if we knew, if our fates were entirely irrelevant to them. I wonder what they said to each other among the racks of wine. I wonder if they argued at all as they tampered with the bottles, if there was any dissent among them about the proper course of action. I had seen the invitations that the queen had written, one of which Fletcher Tan had stolen and passed around the slave quarters, and at the time I did not believe that any of the realm’s scattered aristocracy would come.

But there they were, streaming out of their chambers when the bell rang seven, dressed in their finest clothes. As a collective they smelled sickly sweet, almost deathly, as if they had already begun to decay beneath their frills and high collars and had covered up the smell with essence of lavender and cherry and rose. We fed them appetizers from platters: boiled goat’s toes, cheese-breads, and fish eggs wrapped in leaves. We, too, were dressed in our best uniform- black silken pants and shirts with golden buttons, with shimmering golden capes draped across our backs. 

“Boy,” one of them said to me, leaning in, a red bit of goat stuck between his incisor and his canine, “why don’t you take me to a broom closet somewhere?” His breath smelled like a forgotten pair of shoes.

We were under a standing dictate not to perform sexual favors for anyone except under direct instruction from the queen; too many times had a noble raped a slave and either impregnated them or become uncomfortably attached. Still, it was always one of us who ended up stolen or beheaded or diseased, and never the nobility. I smiled at the man and nodded, and motioned him down a corridor that led towards the east wing. I could feel my stomach churn. I led him down a dizzying path of short hallways and sharp corners until, eventually, we reached a closet. I opened the door. He stepped inside, and I slammed it shut, locked it, and shimmied a nearby stool under the door handle.

“You’ll thank me in the end,” I said over the pounding of his fists against the wood. I headed back, and within two minutes I had slipped back into the party with a tray of krub, my absence unnoticed. There was drinking, mainly of spiced fluck and potato distillation. The gamekeeper lifted three krub from my tray and swallowed them all in one bite. I was surprised and a little disturbed to see that he was drinking water.

“I can fetch you a half of spiced fluck if you wish,” I said.

The gamekeeper shook his head. “If I’m going to die tonight, I want to feel every second of it.”

“I sincerely doubt that you’re going to die tonight, my lord. It’s only a party.”

He only grunted and wandered off, not bothering to take his key back from me. A trumpet sounded, and a herald’s voice called out to move towards the wine room. The crowd streamed almost hastily in that direction.

I entered the wine room. A selection of bottles had been pulled from the racks and laid out on a table, in front of which stood the queen. We filed in behind her and filled glasses from the bottles. The wines were deep, and red, and they left long streaking legs crawling down the sides of their glasses. The queen orated, telling a strange story about a young child with a basket of pastries who kept falling down a hole and popping back out in different places all over the world. She talked about her reign as queen, and all of the accomplishments that she’d made. She made a joke about the rain, and then she told us to begin passing out the queen’s vintage.

The nobles took the glasses from us carefully. Most of them kept the cups away from their faces, held out far in front of them or clutched in front of their genitals. A handful of them sniffed the wine, swirled the glasses in the hands, or even stuck their noses down towards the liquid. Once we were finished, the queen smiled.

“And, of course, we would have nothing without our faithful servants, who keep this castle running and myself from running mad,” she said. “I ask that you, my friends, drink with us as well, for tonight is a night to celebrate how far we have come and how far we have yet to go.”

We took our cups and stood in two rows behind the queen.

“What shall I say? The rain, for all of human history, has brought us life. It brings us plants, it brings us streams and rivers and lakes. It brings us the water for our washing, our bathing, our drinking. For so many months we have begrudged the rain, complained as it blocked our roads and flooded our villages and ruined our crops. Tonight, we drink to the rain. May it go on forever, and ever, and ever.” She raised her glass, put it to her lips, and drank. We were expected to drink next, to put the nobles at ease, and we did. Then, the nobles drank, first little tentative sips and then real swallows, and the ice was broken. Bottles were passed around. We refilled glasses. I drooled my mouthful of wine out onto my sleeve. 

The party continued. The gamekeeper and I descended to the animal pens and returned with the deer, who we let loose in the great courtyard at the center of the festivities. The deer raced about, hopping through the fountain and dodging columns and sliding in the mud. A smattering of nobles stepped into the courtyard, and the gamekeeper brought them to a wheelbarrow in the corner. From the wheelbarrow the nobles drew weapons: three crossbows, a bladed boomerang, a bundle of javelins. The gamekeeper and I stood together on the stone perimeter of the courtyard, watching arrows and javelins crisscrossing the space, punctuated by the boomerang’s long arc. A javelin caught one of the deer in the side, sending it skidding across the trimmed lawn and smearing the emerald grass with crimson. The nobles cheered, and the gamekeeper and I returned to the animal pens to release the horned throg.

He must have noticed that the throg were perfectly alert, but he said nothing to me as we dragged the four creatures through the halls and released them into another courtyard for another set of hunters, these equipped with slings. This time we did not stay to watch, returning immediately to the pens to loose the pair of prairie cats high atop the castle walls. Only a couple of nobles joined us in the downpour, and they chased after the prairie cats with little caution, waving their spears around like parade flags. The gamekeeper shook my hand and followed them, unfolding his own leather sling and nestling a rock from his shoulder bag into its pouch. I stayed in the tower for a few minutes, keeping track of the gamekeeper’s dark shape. His arm flicked backwards, launched forwards, and fifty feet or so ahead one of the nobles collapsed. I retreated downstairs.

Back in the main halls, I saw a woman in a long gown of bright green collapse against the wall. In one moment she was laughing joyfully as a companion whispered into her ear, his hand halfway up her dress. In the next, she slumped against the stone behind her, wheezing. Her eyes fluttered closed. A little bubble of blood formed in the corner of her mouth, and she slid down the wall to the floor. Her companion watched. When the tension rushed from her neck and her head lolled against her clavicle, the man wandered off.

The horned throg were making a commotion down the hall, and I went to investigate. Somehow, two had gotten into the throne room. A group of nobles, all men, stalked about the chamber with their slings, hurling rocks at the frightened creatures. A projectile caught one in the eye, and it roared.

The throne room was a narrow rectangle with high ceilings hung with two chandeliers made of scarlet stained glass. The throne sat on a dais at the far end, its silver trim gleaming from the morning’s waxing. It was double-wide, having been constructed almost three hundred years earlier to seat the Twin Princes, who had taken responsibility for uniting the independent states that became the Ream of Allowell. The queen was fond of saying that the throne still sat two: herself and her shadow. If this was intended to be somehow profound, the message was lost on me. She’d had a lantern erected next to the throne, which we would light during her seatings to make her statement true. In recent months she developed a habit of blaming circumstances on the shadow and sending her courtiers away in bafflement. 

An errant stone clanged against the backing of the chair, leaving a dull mark in its place.

I didn’t realize that anyone in the room had noticed me until another stone caught me in the hip. My attacker let out a triumphant cry. I looked up to see the man strapping a new stone into his leather pouch, and I ran for the door. The next blow hit me in the back of the head, and I fell, disoriented. I covered my face with my arms. A rock skidded harmlessly beside me, and I heard a terrible scream followed by a violent crash. I peeked through my arms and saw one of the throg crouched over a hunter, its horns trapped in his gut. Stones flew towards it from every direction, each collision bending the creature lower and lower. Remaining as close to the ground as I could manage, I slunk out the door. Blood dripped past my right eye, and my head pounded.

Anastien, my sister, met me in the hall. “You’re hurt,” she said.

I waved my hand. “Is it still too soon?”

She nodded. “They’ve started, but there are still plenty left. The queen is tearing down all of her least favorite paintings and hurling them out windows.”

Anastien handed me a clean rag to press to my forehead. We walked together towards the kitchen. I felt lightheaded. We passed several bodies- one man had managed to collapse with his breeches around his ankles. We both jumped at a crack of thunder that sounded as if it struck just around the next corner. The whole castle reeked of spoiling milk.

In the kitchen the cooks had laid out several trays of fish-paste crackers. Anastien and I each grabbed one and headed back into the halls. I always thought that the kitchen was strangely far from the ballroom: it took three rights, two flights of stairs, and a scurry across a courtyard to make it there. That particular courtyard had been covered with a wooden dome in the early days of the storm, when it first became clear that the rains were not going to stop. Nobody had told us; one day, a week after all the food had turned up soggy to an important fashion demonstration, a team of local carpenters erected a scaffolding and went to work. More than once that same team of carpenters had returned to patch holes in the dome.

I became dizzy as we crossed the courtyard, and I stopped for a moment to collect myself. Anastien placed her chilly hand on my forearm and squeezed.

Inside the ballroom was carnage. The smell washed over me like a heavy blanket pulled from the washtub, and I doubled over and vomited on the floor. The largest concentration of corpses congregated around the banquet table, where the nobles seemed to have collapsed all over each other. Smaller clumps of bodies were spread around the room. Anastien called out. A couple of errant moans reached our ears. We let our trays fall from our hands, fish-paste crackers scattering around our feet.

“No more,” Anastien said. She strode over to the nearest bodies, which were slouched at a table loaded with plates of food. She fiddled with a couple of the corpses, checking belts and coat pockets, while I stood in place, my hand covering my mouth and nose. One of the bodies lunged towards Anastien, and she lashed out at it with a flash of steel, slicing it across the face and sending it sprawling to the floor. She returned to me with two daggers and handed me the clean one. “Did you pack your bag?” She asked.

“Yeah.”

“Let’s go.”

We did not need the daggers, after all. Whatever nobles we passed on the way back to our quarters were already dead or dying, with the exception of one manic character we spotted smashing bottles on the floor through the open door of the wine room. We hurried along. Within an hour we were lined up at the docks, Fletcher Tan and a handful of the others who the community had elected to lead the exodus already on board the largest of the ships, rigging sails and setting folks up as comfortably as possible in the hold. Anastien and I dropped our bags below and returned to help roll barrels full of provisions taken from the castle cellars onto the ship. The ship had three masts, a carved figurehead of a sea-dragon, and a strip of gold trim encircling the circumference just below the rail. Engraved in the trim was the ship’s name: Typhoon. 

I reconnected with Freckle, and we staked a claim on a pile of hay with a couple of blankets as our bed, our bags employed as pillows. As we filled the vessel, it became apparent that the hold would be full, but not so cramped as to feel like another imprisonment. Here I would have space to stretch my limbs as I never could in the slave quarters.

I found my sister guiding our mother up the gangplank, and I offered my shoulder for stability. Our mother had been blinded and prematurely aged by the time she’d spent in servitude to the realm’s High Sorcerer, a man who had opened his veins with a severing spell when he realized he could not stop the rain. He’d strap our mother to the wall of his chamber and practice his spells, testing the limits of his capabilities on her body, her mind a thousand miles away in the benevolent fairy forests of her childhood. She smiled when we eased her below deck down the ladder, and the commotion hushed to a murmur as the people bowed their heads in deference to our mother.

If there was anyone who remained alive within the Ivy Castle, I did not see them when the ship pulled away. I scanned the walls for the gamekeeper’s fur cloak, the docks for the queen’s silver crown, but nothing caught my eye. I hoped the gamekeeper died violently and the queen died last, looking upon her work with finally an honest assessment of what it had amounted to. As we drew further off, I was surprised to see just how close the waters were to the main floors of the castle- at this rate, our quarters would be fully submerged in a week, the bottoms of the grand tapestries in the queen’s receiving hall just beginning to dampen. The whole structure looked as if it might slough away from the earth and crash into the sea at any moment.

Could it really be called the sea, I wondered.

The first days of that voyage were strange. The rains pounded the ship’s wooden hull. The winds whipped the sails about, and we had to keep pulling them down to protect them from damage. I fell into place as a deckhand easily enough; I was too young to remember the caravan that brought me as a child to the Ivy Castle and had otherwise never set foot outside the grounds, and I had no experience whatsoever aboard a ship, but I was strong and the work was straightforward and the rain and the spray and the waves refreshed me after a lifetime inside a musty castle. As the weeks went on, our socks grew damp and our feet began to rash. We found little worms wriggling in the hard bread, which we would pick out and chop up and add to our stews. Before bed we sang songs and the children acted out little plays, with sheets and tufts of hay for costumes.

It was like that for exactly one hundred days and one hundred nights. Freckle kept track, carving tally marks into the inner hull by the light of a candle. On the one hundredth and first morning, mother asked to go above deck.

This would turn out to be a project, because mother had grown too weak to ascend the steep wooden ladder. We debated simply carrying her up, but the space was narrow and we worried that the ship might rock. I tried to talk her out of going up at all, but she wouldn’t hear it. Anastien came up with the idea to rig her to the main mast’s pulleys and heave her through the hatch, and we set to fashioning a harness around her. We piled cots and hay at the bottom of the ladder in case she fell, but we needn’t have worried. She floated upwards on the end of the rope, her arms flung back, the rain streaming down through the open hatch and soaking her frail shape, grinning and cackling all the while. When she disappeared from sight and someone above shouted “we got her,” I scrambled up the ladder, Anastien right behind. We caught mother as she pulled loose from the harness and lurched forward, myself at one arm and my sister at the other. We let her lead us to the bow, where we stood on either side, propping her up as she stared out towards the rain pummeling the water. She mumbled something rhythmic and unintelligible. After several minutes, mother closed her wrinkled eyelids.

It took me some time to realize what had happened, but I think Anastien suspected it all along. When I began to sob, she consoled me, mother’s body suspended between us.

“She was ready, that’s all. She was ready.”

The entire community came above deck to see mother off. We covered her completely in a blanket, closed it tight with a length of rope, and lowered her into the water using the same pulley and harness by which she’d only just been risen.

Fletcher Tan spoke a prayer as mother’s body bobbed and drifted across the waters. She grew smaller and smaller, and when she was gone altogether I realized that the rain had stopped, and I heard a bird call out.

© Marge J. Buckley, 2020