Brokedown Palace Read online

  "Oh, mother," says Mózes, "I am to try to marry the King's daughter so my father and my brothers and sisters won't starve to death. How can I do this?"

  "Well," says the cow, "you are handsome enough. But the King will never see you dressed as you are." And, quick as thought, she made him beautiful garments of silver. He thanked her, and went on his way to the city.

  He got there and was sent in to see the King, who said, "You are handsome enough," so he introduced him to his daughter, whose name was Rózsa. Well, Rózsa was the prettiest girl who ever lived on either side of any mountain. She looked at him, and he looked at her, and bells rang, and everything else you can imagine. You can bet they were as much in love as anyone ever was!

  So it was all set, except the King said, "Who is your father, Mózes, so we can invite him to the wedding?" And when Mózes said, "He is a poor man who works in the mines and has three hundred children," the King was mad as a Fásbot bull and tore out his beard.

  When he had calmed down just a little, he said, "All right, Mózes, if you want to marry my daughter, you must do three things for me. First, you must make the River flow backward. Come to me when you have done that."

  Right away, Mózes went to see Rózsa and told her what her father had said. "Leave it to me, handsome Mózes," she said. And she went over to her window and hummed a song that sounded like a flock of bluejays. Pretty soon a tall lady comes into the room. "What do you want, pretty Rózsa?" she says. "Oh, Demon Goddess, I want to marry Mózes, but my father won't consent until he turns the River backward." So the lady says, "Well, Mózes, how tall am I?"

  Mózes says, "Why, you are twice as tall as I am."

  And the lady says, "You are a clever lad!" and has her demons jump into the River and kick up such waves that it seems to run backward.

  Well, the next day, Mózes goes to the King, and he says, "I see you have done what I told you to. Now let us see if you can make the stars shine during the day."

  Well, Mózes runs up to see Rózsa and tells her about it. She just says, "Leave it to me, handsome Mózes." Then she goes to the window and hums a song that sounds like a flock of sparrows. Pretty soon an old lady comes to the window and says, "What do you want, pretty Rózsa?"

  "Oh, Demon Goddess," she says, "I want to marry handsome Mózes, but my father won't let me unless he can make the stars shine during the day."

  "Well, Mózes," says the lady, "how old am I?"

  "Oh, that is easy," says Mózes. "You are twice as old as I am."

  "You are a clever lad," says the lady, and has her demons fly up and put a blanket over the sun, so the stars shine during the day..

  The next day, Mózes came to the King again. The King said, "You certainly are a clever fellow, Mózes. But now the third task: you must move my Palace to the other side of the River."

  Well, just like before, he goes to pretty Rózsa, and she goes to the window and hums like a flock of geese. Pretty soon, a fat lady comes in. When she hears the story, she says, "Well, Mózes, how much do I weigh?"

  "That's easy," said Mózes. "You weigh twice as much as I do."

  "You are a clever fellow," said the lady, and she had her demons move the River so it flowed behind the King's Palace.

  Well, the King was really a good fellow, and he knew when he was beaten at his own game, so he gave the two young people his blessing, and they got married, and Mózes's father and his brothers and sisters all moved into the Palace, and when the old King passed away Mózes became the King, and if they haven't since died, they are still alive to this day.

  THREE

  The Dragon

  Clear water nibbled the toes of brown leather boots and made small, slapping sounds against the low rocks at the lake's edge. The boots supported legs wrapped in brown wool, and a body wrapped in a dirty green tunic over a stained yellow jerkin. On the breast of the jerkin a small animal was sloppily embroidered in black and white.

  Miklós stood on a shelf of flat, grayish rock. Mountains rose behind him and to either side, some of them showing faint white cappings. Before him, as far as he could see, was a lake, also gray but with a blue tint. The lake covered nearly all of the mesa on which he stood, save for an unscalable mountain wall to the near side. On the other side, the north, he could see nothing but water. The breeze came from off the lake, chilly yet bracing.

  Miklós squatted on the rocks. He dropped the branches he had picked up along the way, brushed off his hands, and scooped up a handful of the water of Lake Fenarr and tasted it. It wasn't, perhaps, as sweet as he'd remembered it from the first time he'd passed this spot, or as deliciously icy as he'd imagined it would be during his long years of servitude. Yet, it would do.

  He stood once more and studied the spot where his shadow would be if the sun weren't hidden by the Hand of Faerie. It was more than two years ago that he had passed this way, traveling west. Then, he had known it as the source of the River. Now he knew it for a basin that collected water from higher mountains, and sent it forth both east and west. In the west, the Lake's spawn was called the Eastern River.

  The first time he had come this way it had been morning and the water had been blue and silver in the sunlight. Now it seemed brown and gray. Then, his shadow had preceded him on the final stage to Faerie. Now, at the end of the first stage home, his shadow was so faint it was hardly noticeable.

  Home…

  His reason told him his memory lied, yet, in his memory, home was clean and fresh and strong and secure and a place of rest. His reason told him that László would have turned his room to some other use, but his memory only told him how safe he had felt in his bed. ,

  Reason had done him no good during the last two years, but memory of home had kept him alive. It was reason that had held him there for as long as he had stayed—reason had told him that he was learning, that the strange, extra sense he had been given, the Pathway in his mind, wouldn't help him unless he knew how to use it.

  Enough of that.

  He gathered twigs and dried leaves together on the rocks at the water's edge. He called upon the Power and he demanded fire. After a moment it came, and the twigs and leaves began to smoke, then to burn.

  He dropped the pack he carried on his broad shoulders. He pulled off his boots and set them by the fire. Then jerkin and tunic and leggings. Then he dived into the clear waters of Lake Fenarr.

  He swam with the long, easy strokes of one who has been around water since boyhood, augmented by muscles built from two years of toil.

  It was almost dark when he emerged, dripping and cold, and sat naked by the dying fire. He threw a few small branches on it. When it was going well again, he threw into the flames yellow jerkin, green tunic, and brown leggings.

  From his pack he took the worn, ragged clothing that had been his as a Prince and slowly dressed himself. Only the boots remained of the outfit he had worn upon arriving at this spot. The fire burned high and bright.

  Prince Miklós slept.

  * * * *

  The next day Miklós spent skirting the north shore of Lake Fenarr. The mountain wall on that side sometimes met the water, forcing Miklós out into it, but usually he could walk between lake and mountain. Diminutive streams and waterfalls fed the lake, forcing Miklós over, through, or under them. But this, too, was all right. He ate a few of the biscuits he had taken with him, and slept without a fire. It was around noon of the next day that he began to hear the distant roaring of the waterfall. An hour later, after passing a ledge of rock that forced him into the lake up to his knees, he began to see the fine mist kicked up by the cascade.

  Then he was on a ledge above the falls. He looked down, but the bottom was hidden in the mist and spray. He remembered the climb up, though. Nearly a thousand feet, the water fell. Yet the path had been easy. He looked for signs of it, but didn't see any.

  Some of those he had lived with (the term "friends" never entered his mind) had been able to leap from great heights, landing as soft as a leaf. But they had been old and had p
racticed the use of the Power for many times the length of his life. He wouldn't be able to do that with the little he knew.

  He walked along the ledge for nearly an hour until he had convinced himself that the path was no longer there. This being the case, there was nothing to do except go down without one.

  There was no point in hesitating. He took a good look over the edge, found a footrest below, and made for it—going feet first over the edge, scrabbling and straining. He found a small ledge a little farther down. His hands gripped rock, his feet settled onto the shelf.

  He carefully turned himself around, scraping his right shoulder, and looked down between his feet. A momentary vertigo he banished with an act of will.

  The next ledge was wider but farther away. He slowly bent his knees, letting his back scrape against the side of the mountain, until he could sit. From there he turned quickly while grasping with his fingers. He hung for a moment, then let go. The drop was only a few inches, yet for an instant he nearly went over backward. He recovered his balance, then his breath.

  It occurred to him that descending a mountainside was its own art—one that could probably be studied and learned. There were many things to study and learn. He would have a chance to study none of them if he were unable to make his way safely down the mountain.

  As he faced away from the cliff, the edge of the waterfall was visible fifty feet to his right. He twisted and looked up. The top, from which he had started, was about fifteen feet above him. Only nine hundred and eighty-five feet left to go.

  He began looking for another hand—or foothold below him.

  * * * *

  He slept in a shallow cave halfway down the cliffside. He had made considerable lateral progress away from the falls, though at one point had had to go nearly under it. His descent had been painfully slow after the first two hours, as he was afraid that exhaustion would do the job of carelessness.

  While he sleeps, let us explain why it is that the path he had taken on his journey to Faerie was no longer there for his journey back. For thousands of years, water had been seeping into the flaws in the cliff face, slowly dissolving granite and making large cracks of the small ones. Few ever came this way; Miklós had been the last to use the path before it finally collapsed of its own weight and went crashing onto the ground at the base of the falls.

  The new cliff wall, while it had no path in it, was jagged and uneven. An experienced mountaineer would have had no trouble. Miklós, on awakening fresh the next morning, and with a day of climbing experience behind him, made his careful, painstaking way down the rest of the cliff to the pile of rubble and broken boulders at the bottom by afternoon.

  He spent the rest of that day there, at the source of the River, never quite dry because of the spray from the falls, but not minding. In the evening he moved off a short distance to where it was dry and built a fire. He ate a few more biscuits, then lay down next to the embers of the fire and fell asleep.

  He dreamt.

  In his dream, he saw the Palace that was his home. He saw it as he remembered it, not as it was. He saw jhereg flying around it, and he became aware that each time one flew near, it would take a bite out of the Palace, and he realized that soon there would be nothing left of it.

  When he awoke, he knew that he must set out for home at once. Yet he paused for a moment, delighting in the sun in his eyes, though it nearly blinded him.

  In all his bitter days in the land of twilight that men called Faerie, he had not been aware of how badly he had missed the morning sun. Looking back to his time in Faerie, he realized that he had never really believed the sun would not appear. It had always seemed to him that the sky would clear on the morrow.

  He turned away from the sun. When the spots cleared from his eyes, he stared up at the height from which he had descended the day before.

  He was certainly safe from his master now. His master would not follow him—in fact, would probably not have considered following him in any case.

  It wasn't, Miklós reflected, as if his escape had been difficult. The others he had lived with and worked beside had seemed to accept their lot, and he had been expected to do the same. There had never been anything to prevent an escape. Nothing except the difficulty of breaking patterns that, in only a few days, seemed to have become ingrained. And, as well, always the question of where to go, and what to do when he got there.

  But he could only take so much. Finally, one morning he had put his old clothes and a small bit of food into his pack and had walked away from the master's fields and into the mountains he had come from. No one would miss him, that was certain.

  Miklós was going home. As for what he would do there, he'd know that when he did it.

  * * * *

  … And he was in the forest.

  It came up that suddenly. For a few hours after leaving the base of the waterfall, he was walking along a path through hard, rocky ground, with the River a distant, wavering line on his right. Then there was a blur ahead of him as he began to notice grass beneath his feet. Then the blur took shape, and then he was in the Wandering Forest—amid the hickory and the birch and the heaken and the oak—with the clean scent of growth all about him and cool wind in his face.

  He wasn't sure why, but he moved away from the path. He walked through thickets and around trees, jumping over puddles and disturbing teckla that scurried and norska that hopped. As he walked, humming songs from childhood and listening to the chatter of the birds, he considered again what he would do upon returning.

  He would see his parents, of course. He realized with a sudden pang of guilt that they might have died while he was gone. Then he laughed to himself. He had hardly left the Palace of his own volition. Yes, he would see his parents, if they yet lived. And dear Andor and big, laughing Vilmos. And László.

  László. The King. King, he thought to himself. His master had owned ten times the land that László ruled, yet was called the name that means "Baron" in their tongue. Miklós shuddered as he thought of the power his master had wielded. An effort of will, and he could be miles away. A snap of his fingers and a hovel would burn and crumble and disappear as if it had never been.

  And pitiful László called himself a King.

  Miklós realized that he no longer feared László. What he had learned in Faerie was little enough next to those who had worked the fields beside him and insignificant next to his master, yet next to László he could be a god.

  But as Miklós walked, and hummed, and listened to the sounds and smelt the smells of the Wandering Forest, this mood passed. László had always had a temper, and did things he later regretted. László had, in all probability, spent the last two years regretting that night. He probably believed Miklós dead and tormented himself with the thought.

  No, punishing László was not what he had returned to do.

  Returned to do?

  He considered this thought. Where had it come from? Why the feeling that there was something that he needed to do? He had a life to live. People to meet. Lovers to love. Maybe he could learn to climb mountains.

  Then he remembered his dream of the night before and spent much of the rest of the day wondering.

  * * * *

  Miklós awoke the next morning to a drizzle of rain that threatened to become a downpour. He quickly gathered his pack together and ran until he found a broad oak under which to take shelter. By mid-morning the rain ended, and the sun was glimmering through fat oak leaves.

  Miklós began walking. He was well into the Forest by now. With each mile his mood seemed to shift; sometimes anticipatory, sometimes apprehensive, sometimes eager, sometimes ambivalent.

  He had noticed this and was pondering it (he had always been introspective) when the woods around him became quiet. In the Wandering Forest it was no great feat of woodsmanship to notice the silence; it was a place filled with birds that piped, small animals that chittered, larger animals that growled. When they unceremoniously stopped the orchestration (leaving Miklós feeling v
aguely stupid for having missed whatever message they had all received), Miklós stopped as well, listening intently and looking around.

  On a branch of the oak nearest him sat an athyra with its thick brown plumage and hooked beak. A little way off, a teckla sat up on its back legs, motionless except for quick, furtive movements of its gray, whiskered head. Nothing else moved.

  Miklós dropped to one knee so he wouldn't tire of standing. He realized that he knew, as well as any of the other animals, that something was coming. He had to keep reminding himself to breathe. Gradually, though, he adjusted to the rhythm of the Forest—the tensionless waiting, the alert calmness.

  He had been kneeling, motionless, for several minutes when it appeared, as a flickering movement through a thicket, far off to the right of the direction he was facing. He watched it carefully, not wanting to move until he knew what direction it was safe to move in.

  The teckla knew this before he did—it darted off to Miklós's left. Miklós considered briefly, then followed. He glanced back, but the athyra hadn't moved. He looked over to where the movement had appeared and had a sudden, clear vision of a monstrous head—narrow, triangular, and reptilian. He had never seen it before, but his stay in Faerie had taught him to recognize it. Three small tentacles, which Miklós knew to be sense organs, descended from its chin. There would be larger ones around its neck, but Miklós didn't remain to see them. He raced off through the woods, hoping the teckla knew enough to pick a direction opposite the one the dragon would choose.

  * * * *

  The wandering forest wrapped itself like a sheet around the base of the Mountains of Faerie. Here and there, intermixed with trees, brooks, weeds, and shrubs, were outcroppings of granite—an advance guard, as it were, for the eastward march of the mountains. Some of these were almost high enough to be considered mountains themselves, or at least hills. They were new, as such things go, and hadn't been around long enough to develop a layer of topsoil for the use of grass and trees. Only occasional weeds sprang from flaws in the rock.