In the Lion’s Mouth

Cengjam Gaafe: The First Interrogatory

Méarana strikes the arm of her chair with the flat of her hand. “I knew it! He was coming here, after all. To see you, Mother. You know what that means?”

Bridget ban tosses her head. “That he’s a masochist?”

The harper makes a moue. “He wanted a second chance.”

“He’s had that already.”

“A third, then. What difference does the count make?”

Bridget ban sets her face and turns to her. “This is something we can discuss later.” And a motion of her eyes indicates both Olafsdottr and Graceful Bintsaif.

The harper shrugs. “As you will. But I think there are no surprises for the tale-spinner.”

The Hound gives her attention back to the—Prisoner? Guest? Visitor? “Tell me,” she says, “how you can know the thoughts of Donovan buigh, when I doubt even he knows them so well?”

The Confederal smiles. “You must grant me two things. The first is many weeks of conversation between us, in which he may have revealed his mind to me.”

“That would be quite a revelation as I understand things. And second?”

“And second, you must grant me some poetic license.” Olafsdottr nods at the glasses of nectar that stand before each of them. “You have not drunk from your glass. Do I take that as evidence that the glass set initially before me was tinctured with sooth juice? Oho! I have not heard Graceful Bintsaif behind me lift her glass, either.”

“Oh, for pity’s sake,” says the harper. “Here!” And she drinks from her own glass and then reaches across the table to hand it to the Confederal. Bridget ban hisses, but the agent makes no move to snatch her daughter. It might come to a struggle later—at some point they must all give thought to whether and how Olafsdottr would leave the Hall—but for now she has come merely to talk.

The Shadow swallows the rest of the nectar. “Ooh. Very tasty. Stoorytelling is dry work.”

“How much of the story so far has been true?” asks Graceful Bintsaif.

Olafsdottr turns to look at her. “Soo untroosting, you are. All of it true. Perhaps not all factual.”

The junior Hound snorts. “A contradiction.”

“On the contrary! What is factual is what is done, accomplished. A verdict. But what is true is what is faithful, and loyal. Perhaps all facts are true, but not all truths are fact.” She turns to face Bridget ban and the harper. “A story may be true to life.”

“Verdict,” says the harper, “means ‘to speak truth’ in some ancient tongue.”

The Confederal tilts her head sideways. “Does it? Oh, there are languages older than the oldest tongues! Why do you not fetch your harp? He toold me how well you play, how well you improovise on a theme.”

The harper looks to her mother. “I think she tells the truth. The Donovan she describes is a man I recognize. If she has embellished his thoughts, she has not done so falsely.”

Bridget ban considers this for a time. She folds her hands flat together and tucks them under her lips, and her eyes grow hard and distant. Her lips move, just a little. Finally, she makes a sign with her right hand and lays both hands flat on the arms of her chair. “I will be no barbarian. You came to us unafraid. You may remain in the same manner. Mr. Wladislaw, bring Miss Lucia’s harp to the sitting room, please. And…” She nods to Olafsdottr. “May I serve you some coffee?”

The Confederal’s eyes widen; then she laughs. “Of course. I come expecting to drink more than that.”

“And bring coffee, also,” the mistress of the Hall tells the Ears through which her butler listens.

“I don’t understand,” Méarana says to the smiles she sees on the other three women. “What is so funny about coffee?”

Olafsdottr answers. “It is what we say in the Confederacy, lady harp, when we bring someone in for questioning. Cengjam gaafe. ‘Invite in for coffee.’ There are other phrases—samman, kaowèn, or worst of all duxing kaoda. La, we have more ways of asking questions than we have questions to ask. Ooh, here come faithful retainer with harp and coffee!”

Mr. Wladislaw accomplishes this Herculean task by carrying the harp in his own hands. It is a clairseach, a lap harp of the old style, with metal strings played with the nails. It is draped in a velvet cloth of royal purple and Méarana believes she can hear the strings singing to her. Likely, it is the breath of the air passing through the chords as the butler carries it; but Méarana prefers the poetic to the mundane. The passage of air explains how it sings; it does not explain that it sings.

The coffee is brought in a more pedestrian manner by the butler’s assistant, who wears white gloves of all things and pushes before him a gravity cart with a silver coffee service upon it. If the Confederal wonders that the coffee has already been waiting to be fetched, and that Bridget ban has orchestrated the meeting to achieve this gesture, she does not show it on her face, which is as cheerfully concealing as ever.

“You smile too much,” Bridget ban tells her.

Olafsdottr’s grin broadens. “I will try to be more dooleful as my tale unwinds. Most people, I think, would wish more opportunity to smile than what their lives give them.”

“A man may conceal with a smile more effectively than with a great stone face. The stone face may not reveal much; but it will always reveal that it is not revealing. The smiling face appears open, which makes it the greater lie.”

The Confederal nods. “I see you do not lie.”

Bridget ban stiffens for a moment. “Being kidnapped could have been no reason to smile for Donovan buigh. Have you no regrets at what you deprived him of?”

“Ooh, I have many regrets; as many as I have winters behind me. The Fates deprive a man of nothing but that they do not grant him something else. What have I deprived him of? You? By your own account, he did not have that when he left Jehovah.”

“When you took him from there,” Méarana corrects her. She has been tuning her harp to the second mode, for Olafsdottr had told a sad onset to the tale. Father ripped untimely from his own intentions, on the very verge of coming home. What, she wonders, could be more tragic than that?

“But how closely do you attend me?” the Confederal asks the room. “He had great fun, the scarred man did. Opening my locks. Poisoning my food. Throwing metal slugs at my head. Planning my ambush and death. What more fun may a man have and live afterward? As you have orchestrated this tête-à-tête, so did I orchestrate our little voyage. He woke too early, I grant you. But … have you ever danced with a cobra? Sometimes, in a life grown hardened to danger, one must seek the greater risk to enjoy the greater thrill.”

Méarana hums a tenor F, pauses to adjust one of the half intervals on the strings (for her chords are no more well tempered than she), and then pauses expectantly and looks around the room at the others.

Graceful Bintsaif has been watching her with some incredulity. Perhaps she wonders at playing music with a cobra in the room. But music, by long tradition, eases the serpent’s bile.

Bridget ban, for her part, has waited patiently. She is long inured to her daughter’s eccentricities. And well so, for had not one of those eccentricities impelled her to seek out her father and to rescue her mother from utter oblivion? And all that with no small risk to herself. Bridget ban does not fear death, for she holds to a belief that death is not the end. But unending suspension in a lost and derelict ark was no more death than it was life. Rather, it was some awful schrödingerian halfway point, partaking of the worst features of both.

When all seems settled, the Hound, who has never once taken her eyes from her guest, pours out a cup of coffee and hands it to Ravn Olafsdottr. “A small question,” she says.

Olafsdottr drinks the hot brew without hesitation, even though its bitter taste could hide a thousand potions that in pear nectar would curdle its sweetness. “Ask,” she says.

“For all his games at escape, for all his secret passageways, and picked locks, and poisoned Joe Freezy, I see that Donovan buigh…” She spreads her arms to take in the room. “… is not here. And this tells me that all such attempts failed. Else, he would be telling me this tale—and with far more relish, as I recall the man—and you would be sitting less comfortably.”

Olafsdottr’s laugh is like the trilling of a bird on the wing. “Noo. The Fates rule all, and some things are not to be. Our two destinies were intertwined. I meant what I said, that he and I would become great companions; although the Fates are cruel and have a sense of humor, so that while the foreseeing was true, the companionship was not what anyone expected. The joke, as always, is on us; though seldom to our amusement. Play, harper, and your strings our tale promote and with your chords catch out the discord note.”