Rowan
You remember. My north walls rounded by buffeting storm, my south walls shapeless with ivy. My whistling tunnels between the gates, where the wind came in with you and panicked for a moment, tangling, before finding its way out. My copper veins, my wooden bones, my tapestried skin, my muscle of stone. The curves of my inner arms wrapping in stair and passageway round to the hearth, the arches of longing, the banners that meant something, the covered bridges leading inward to untouchable ideal and outward to glory. The ramparts, the barracks and the armor, the palisades pointed on top as if to bloody the very sky, because castles are violent.
You remember.
Prince Leo will say he rules me. But I cannot be ruled; I am rule.
He will say he owns me. But I am that old battle between ownership and nothing. I am a built thing in the wilderness. I am the castle you remember, when you hunger after history like the taste of blood.
I have no name, for no one has ever dared to name me. I was built by Dwarves, the ancients of the North, almost three hundred years ago. They built me like the inside of the earth. They built me like a law, at a time when the first law had been broken—a bulwark against the collapse of reality.
I press upon the earth; I grow up from the earth, more rooted in its darkness than the trees, and my shape reflects the sky, the dead-old grid of the stars. The Dwarves gave me voice that way, by anchoring me to these rhythms: the spinning, ever-returning universe above me, the eternal dying beneath me, the dissolution of things into particles, into liquid, into fire. The people living within me do not think of such things. But they are happening anyway. They are why you remember.
A castle is never afraid. A castle never reacts or trembles. A castle is slow in living, and slow in dying, and tempers the rash hearts of men. It retains forever the whispers of women. Wrens and swallows nest in its eaves. It crumbles, but never falls.
When I die, I will die layer by layer, sanctum within sanctum, spiral stair within spiral stair, each pattern exposed in beauty to the forgiveness of wind and the desolation of sun. I will become new castles of ruin upon the tumultuous, crow-pecked earth.
♕♕♕♕ ♕
Here, a room of voices. Once upon a time, the insults of ten or twenty or a hundred warlords crossed quickly here and were done, and their bones strengthened my floors. Once upon another time, this happened again. Agreements were made and broken, rules were formed and challenged, tales were sung and secretly revised, victories were celebrated and drowned in drink. And the fire of this hearth, in the center of their eating, was my heart; and the fire never went out. Until it did. And then one hundred years passed.
Once upon a time, here were only echoes digesting in space. I kept quiet. I listened to the crickets and phoebes and, once every day or two, the streak of a hawk’s cry between clouds. I felt the ants describing grand sketches of hunger and decay with their immortal feet, I dreamed of beetles etching trees and one more stand of moss unfurling one more frond as an eon ended and began. And then, only yesterday perhaps, the court of King William and Queen Mona Anai from Sirenia murmured through in rustling silk, their voices first nervously triumphant and then tight with fear, as the winds drummed my sides with rising Barbarian threats.
Queen Mona saw the Dark Faerie Queen Rhiannon from her ebony window, and that Dark Queen held something she wanted.
Rhiannon said, I offer you this gift, and in exchange I will take whatever I wish from you.
I don’t care, said the young queen. I hate my life, all alone in this dreary place. There is nothing I have that I want.
I warn you, I will take what I wish, repeated Rhiannon, and you will not even know I have taken it until it is too late.
I don’t care. Take anything, repeated Mona.
And in the end, warned Rhiannon, this gift that I offer you will be all you have left, and it will ruin you.
Give it to me, said Mona. It was a mirror.
♕♕♕♕ ♕
Later, they were gone. And today: Prince Leo, just arrived. He says the castle belongs to him—names me Leo’s Castle, the first name ever given to a thing the Barbarians feared to name. His small band of warriors-in-training, sleeping in their heaving, stinking, snoring splendor, fills my heart-room of voices tonight, and he owns this small brotherhood who now calls him Prince, an achievement equal to the conquest of a thousand-man army in any other land, because the Barbarians have heretofore bowed to no one.
So that is something, he thinks.
To own a castle is to own power. The deep protection in layers of walls. The stronghold on high. And perhaps most of all, the view from the towers, for my windows are eyes. They frame it like a painting: the wide, serpentine moor-valleys full of hidden Barbarian clans, bastions of unused might—to Leo’s eyes. To King William Anai of Sirenia, of course, my tower eyes framed a different painting: a wilderness of unrest, simmering shadow-lands of unruly animal-people, whose restless weapons called into question all the Sirenian priests held dear. And peaks rising higher behind me, with heights impossible to see, from which could and would come anything.
To the warlords who came before, for hundreds of years, from a hundred foreign lands, there was no time to look at paintings. No time to stand on high. And thus they never owned me. For to own a castle is to own vision.
Queen Mona, in her madness, looked here. She looked out of the eye and into it. Once upon a time she saw—from above where the Rivers begin—a Dark Faerie coming for her husband. Yes, and once she saw a Dark Faerie coming for her soul. And once she looked into the mirror and saw herself, at last, and that was the end of her.
For what happens in my round, high rooms? Down in my belly, the servants are busy with the magic of life: turning death into food, turning wine into spirit, making order of chaos, channeling the waters, blocking out the winds, feeding animals that they will soon kill, and all that humans do. But up above in my mind, in the towers ringed by so many eyes, the lords and ladies must consider all this. Separated by yet another drawbridge—arched almost delicately, so dangerously lovely, like the glide of a woman’s long train—they own the privacy of their special rooms. They dream the light dreams and the dark. They make love or they don’t, and then they sit awake and alone, long into the night, when the view out those windows is nothing but distance—and lights so far away in the sky you can hardly believe in them.
Does Prince Leo pace in my mind tonight? After all, he channels the smoke of my hearth with a dragon’s head, a louvre he ordered made despite frightened protests, and from whose flaring nostrils smoke signals a warning to all who attend: Prince Leo rules here, and he fears not even the dragons who lurk in the mountains above him. Leo, the new Barbarian prince.
Does this prince who boasts a determination beyond normal human strength, which drew him from near-starvation in the Northern Primeval Forest to the life of a warrior, because his mother was a Barbarian (at least he thought she must be) and in his veins ran the blood of people who always chose death before surrender, combined for the first time with the blood of Sirenian royalty, and because he had fought every challenger and won, and because of all the feuding warlords he was the most cunning, the most handsome, the most convincing, and the most intuitively equipped to recognize weakness in any situation and slice cleanly to its heart—does he pace alone on this night, and does he ever tremble?
Only I know.
I remember when he carried in the princess. And so does he.
The inhuman paleness of her face, the unrippled liquid of her black hair, her crafty smallness and bird-wing bones, and most of all her blood- red mouth. Leo has slain more men than he can count; he has watched men die in every gruesome manner imaginable without flinching; but to him the violence of that hot red brushstroke across that white face is more than he can bear to gaze upon without a cold flame passing through him.To gaze upon that mouth makes him convulse in dark parts of his body; when she parts her lips, he feels that he is witnessing something more obscene than nudity. When he closes his eyes, he sees...
The Dwarves live beneath the northern rivers, the rivers that run screeching from the source of all rivers, the source of dragons, over long slates of black stone into craters tended by these, the oldest gods. Where Barbarians never go. What looked at first to be rows of cairns piled in river after river in the rocky distance transformed into small horrid men as he came closer. Sentinels. As if they had been waiting for him. Not moving but merely watching him as he came on, and as he passed them didn’t they seem like hundreds? Until he realized only the same ones repeated over and over—and finally they came closer together, and then they parted, revealing what lay there in the water among them--
“Take her to the castle,” they said to him, parting perhaps in deference to his sword, in words so barking, wild, and strange that he could not tell afterwards how he had understood them, “for it needs its rightful ruler.” (He assumed that meant him. Only seventeen years old. Prince of the Barbarians.)
He and his men carried her in her glass box, up the long stairs, up to my mouth.
You remember, too. How when you enter a castle, you enter refuge or terror. You enter the grandeur of the sacred. Through gateway after fortified gateway, I swallow you in.
And on that day, upon my lip, upon the threshold where the “prince” entered again this house of sovereignty which he claims to own, he tripped. He did! Forever he will deny it, as will his men, so that they may live, but I know it. I felt it. He tripped upon my lip, and they collapsed against one another behind him. Dropped the glass case. Shattered her to waking.
Ask the Dwarves. It was for this purpose I was made, after all. The shattering.
Princess Rowan Anai. Born of Faerie and raised by Dwarves, abandoned by her father King William and sentenced to death by her step-mother Queen Mona, she was cursed to sleep and woke as she broke—but was the curse still on her? They all stopped and stared, bracing themselves against fear as if it were a mighty wind.
She wasn’t cut too badly, though that little bit of blood looked very fierce upon her bright white skin. And it reminded them of something. Those colors, red and white—and the blackness of her hair as she cried out like an animal in the cold and snapped her body into a ball, her tresses enclosing her knees—were familiar to them. As they would be to you.
“Seize her,” said Prince Leo to his men, as if she were running. And I swallowed her up.
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You remember.
Prince Leo will say he rules me. But I cannot be ruled; I am rule.
He will say he owns me. But I am that old battle between ownership and nothing. I am a built thing in the wilderness. I am the castle you remember, when you hunger after history like the taste of blood.
I have no name, for no one has ever dared to name me. I was built by Dwarves, the ancients of the North, almost three hundred years ago. They built me like the inside of the earth. They built me like a law, at a time when the first law had been broken—a bulwark against the collapse of reality.
I press upon the earth; I grow up from the earth, more rooted in its darkness than the trees, and my shape reflects the sky, the dead-old grid of the stars. The Dwarves gave me voice that way, by anchoring me to these rhythms: the spinning, ever-returning universe above me, the eternal dying beneath me, the dissolution of things into particles, into liquid, into fire. The people living within me do not think of such things. But they are happening anyway. They are why you remember.
A castle is never afraid. A castle never reacts or trembles. A castle is slow in living, and slow in dying, and tempers the rash hearts of men. It retains forever the whispers of women. Wrens and swallows nest in its eaves. It crumbles, but never falls.
When I die, I will die layer by layer, sanctum within sanctum, spiral stair within spiral stair, each pattern exposed in beauty to the forgiveness of wind and the desolation of sun. I will become new castles of ruin upon the tumultuous, crow-pecked earth.
♕♕♕♕ ♕
Here, a room of voices. Once upon a time, the insults of ten or twenty or a hundred warlords crossed quickly here and were done, and their bones strengthened my floors. Once upon another time, this happened again. Agreements were made and broken, rules were formed and challenged, tales were sung and secretly revised, victories were celebrated and drowned in drink. And the fire of this hearth, in the center of their eating, was my heart; and the fire never went out. Until it did. And then one hundred years passed.
Once upon a time, here were only echoes digesting in space. I kept quiet. I listened to the crickets and phoebes and, once every day or two, the streak of a hawk’s cry between clouds. I felt the ants describing grand sketches of hunger and decay with their immortal feet, I dreamed of beetles etching trees and one more stand of moss unfurling one more frond as an eon ended and began. And then, only yesterday perhaps, the court of King William and Queen Mona Anai from Sirenia murmured through in rustling silk, their voices first nervously triumphant and then tight with fear, as the winds drummed my sides with rising Barbarian threats.
Queen Mona saw the Dark Faerie Queen Rhiannon from her ebony window, and that Dark Queen held something she wanted.
Rhiannon said, I offer you this gift, and in exchange I will take whatever I wish from you.
I don’t care, said the young queen. I hate my life, all alone in this dreary place. There is nothing I have that I want.
I warn you, I will take what I wish, repeated Rhiannon, and you will not even know I have taken it until it is too late.
I don’t care. Take anything, repeated Mona.
And in the end, warned Rhiannon, this gift that I offer you will be all you have left, and it will ruin you.
Give it to me, said Mona. It was a mirror.
♕♕♕♕ ♕
Later, they were gone. And today: Prince Leo, just arrived. He says the castle belongs to him—names me Leo’s Castle, the first name ever given to a thing the Barbarians feared to name. His small band of warriors-in-training, sleeping in their heaving, stinking, snoring splendor, fills my heart-room of voices tonight, and he owns this small brotherhood who now calls him Prince, an achievement equal to the conquest of a thousand-man army in any other land, because the Barbarians have heretofore bowed to no one.
So that is something, he thinks.
To own a castle is to own power. The deep protection in layers of walls. The stronghold on high. And perhaps most of all, the view from the towers, for my windows are eyes. They frame it like a painting: the wide, serpentine moor-valleys full of hidden Barbarian clans, bastions of unused might—to Leo’s eyes. To King William Anai of Sirenia, of course, my tower eyes framed a different painting: a wilderness of unrest, simmering shadow-lands of unruly animal-people, whose restless weapons called into question all the Sirenian priests held dear. And peaks rising higher behind me, with heights impossible to see, from which could and would come anything.
To the warlords who came before, for hundreds of years, from a hundred foreign lands, there was no time to look at paintings. No time to stand on high. And thus they never owned me. For to own a castle is to own vision.
Queen Mona, in her madness, looked here. She looked out of the eye and into it. Once upon a time she saw—from above where the Rivers begin—a Dark Faerie coming for her husband. Yes, and once she saw a Dark Faerie coming for her soul. And once she looked into the mirror and saw herself, at last, and that was the end of her.
For what happens in my round, high rooms? Down in my belly, the servants are busy with the magic of life: turning death into food, turning wine into spirit, making order of chaos, channeling the waters, blocking out the winds, feeding animals that they will soon kill, and all that humans do. But up above in my mind, in the towers ringed by so many eyes, the lords and ladies must consider all this. Separated by yet another drawbridge—arched almost delicately, so dangerously lovely, like the glide of a woman’s long train—they own the privacy of their special rooms. They dream the light dreams and the dark. They make love or they don’t, and then they sit awake and alone, long into the night, when the view out those windows is nothing but distance—and lights so far away in the sky you can hardly believe in them.
Does Prince Leo pace in my mind tonight? After all, he channels the smoke of my hearth with a dragon’s head, a louvre he ordered made despite frightened protests, and from whose flaring nostrils smoke signals a warning to all who attend: Prince Leo rules here, and he fears not even the dragons who lurk in the mountains above him. Leo, the new Barbarian prince.
Does this prince who boasts a determination beyond normal human strength, which drew him from near-starvation in the Northern Primeval Forest to the life of a warrior, because his mother was a Barbarian (at least he thought she must be) and in his veins ran the blood of people who always chose death before surrender, combined for the first time with the blood of Sirenian royalty, and because he had fought every challenger and won, and because of all the feuding warlords he was the most cunning, the most handsome, the most convincing, and the most intuitively equipped to recognize weakness in any situation and slice cleanly to its heart—does he pace alone on this night, and does he ever tremble?
Only I know.
I remember when he carried in the princess. And so does he.
The inhuman paleness of her face, the unrippled liquid of her black hair, her crafty smallness and bird-wing bones, and most of all her blood- red mouth. Leo has slain more men than he can count; he has watched men die in every gruesome manner imaginable without flinching; but to him the violence of that hot red brushstroke across that white face is more than he can bear to gaze upon without a cold flame passing through him.To gaze upon that mouth makes him convulse in dark parts of his body; when she parts her lips, he feels that he is witnessing something more obscene than nudity. When he closes his eyes, he sees...
The Dwarves live beneath the northern rivers, the rivers that run screeching from the source of all rivers, the source of dragons, over long slates of black stone into craters tended by these, the oldest gods. Where Barbarians never go. What looked at first to be rows of cairns piled in river after river in the rocky distance transformed into small horrid men as he came closer. Sentinels. As if they had been waiting for him. Not moving but merely watching him as he came on, and as he passed them didn’t they seem like hundreds? Until he realized only the same ones repeated over and over—and finally they came closer together, and then they parted, revealing what lay there in the water among them--
“Take her to the castle,” they said to him, parting perhaps in deference to his sword, in words so barking, wild, and strange that he could not tell afterwards how he had understood them, “for it needs its rightful ruler.” (He assumed that meant him. Only seventeen years old. Prince of the Barbarians.)
He and his men carried her in her glass box, up the long stairs, up to my mouth.
You remember, too. How when you enter a castle, you enter refuge or terror. You enter the grandeur of the sacred. Through gateway after fortified gateway, I swallow you in.
And on that day, upon my lip, upon the threshold where the “prince” entered again this house of sovereignty which he claims to own, he tripped. He did! Forever he will deny it, as will his men, so that they may live, but I know it. I felt it. He tripped upon my lip, and they collapsed against one another behind him. Dropped the glass case. Shattered her to waking.
Ask the Dwarves. It was for this purpose I was made, after all. The shattering.
Princess Rowan Anai. Born of Faerie and raised by Dwarves, abandoned by her father King William and sentenced to death by her step-mother Queen Mona, she was cursed to sleep and woke as she broke—but was the curse still on her? They all stopped and stared, bracing themselves against fear as if it were a mighty wind.
She wasn’t cut too badly, though that little bit of blood looked very fierce upon her bright white skin. And it reminded them of something. Those colors, red and white—and the blackness of her hair as she cried out like an animal in the cold and snapped her body into a ball, her tresses enclosing her knees—were familiar to them. As they would be to you.
“Seize her,” said Prince Leo to his men, as if she were running. And I swallowed her up.
BACK TO BOOK INFO. PAGE
