The Liar's Key
• • •
For a moment I glimpsed branches, lattice-worked across a bright sky, sliding past. A sense of bodies moving around me, a face leaning in, indistinct.
• • •
“Bite your tongue.”
I look up from the crimson carpet. “Sorry, Mama.”
“Queen Alica is your sovereign and you must never speak ill of her, Jally.” Mother kneels to be on a level with me.
“She’s mean,” I say. Or rather, I said it fifteen years ago and now I remember the moment, the feeling of the word, my mother still above me though kneeling, disapproval painted on her face, trying not to smile.
“Sometimes a queen has to be . . . hard, Jally. Ruling a land is difficult. The gods know I have a trouble enough getting three young boys through each day.” The gods. Sometimes Mother forgets herself. Father says there is only one God, but then that’s his job. Grandmother must have staked a lot by the bloodlines to match her cardinal to a heathen, converted from her many gods, glorious in their variety of form and virtue, to our singular invisible deity. How much did that dispensation from Roma cost the treasury I wonder? Father may have a cathedral and a fat book full of God’s own wisdom, but Jally likes Mother’s stories better, told in a soft voice by his bedside. She places a kiss on my forehead and stands again.
We’re back in the Roma Hall, in one of the galleries on the first floor. The north gallery, by the slant of the sun through its tall windows. These have glass, dozens of small panes of Attar glass leaded together, each with a faint green hue. When I was very young I called it the Green Sky Room.
“What’s wrong with your hand, Mama?” She’s standing with her right hand in her own shadow and it looks wrong . . . a touch too bright. She looks down and quickly folds her arms, a guilty motion. Jally stares up at her and I watch. She’s the same woman that I see in my locket. Not much more than thirty and seeming younger, long dark hair, dark eyes, beautiful. The picture I have is by a very skilled artist but somehow it doesn’t capture her. It’s only when these memories flow through me that I remember how far she travelled to be my mother, how alone she must have felt in a strange land. Grandmother may have picked Mother for her blood but whatever heritage she carried in her veins it made little impact on my appearance or that of my brothers. She may have darkened the gold of our hair but to look at us there’s nothing of the Indus to see. The blond comes from Gabron, Grandmother’s third husband, or from her father or grandfather, Gholloths one and two, passed down to our father—though he hides it beneath a cardinal’s hat often as not, along with his bald spot—and on down to us. “Your hand looks . . . different.”
“Nothing’s wrong with it, Jally. Let’s get you back to Nanna Odette.”
Where her fingers can be glimpsed behind the other arm I can see the glow, more pronounced now.
“Stealing is bad,” Jally says. I suppose it’s true—though I wouldn’t let it stop me—but I can’t see the relevance.
“It’s borrowing.” Mother brings her hand out and opens it. The orichalcum is glowing in her palm, brighter than it was in Garyus’s room, the light more steady. “But you’re right, Jally, it was wrong not to ask.” She leans forward. “Can you give it back to him and not say where you got it? He won’t be cross with you.” She looks worried and that makes Jally afraid. He nods slowly, reaching out to take it.
“I won’t say, Mama.” He says it in a solemn tone, confusion filling him. He’s sad but he doesn’t know why. I could tell him that he’s seen for the first time his mother do wrong, his mother be afraid and without certainty. It’s a hurt every child must suffer as they grow.
Mother shakes her head, keeping the orichalcum in her grasp. “A moment.” She turns away from me, goes toward the doorway that opens onto a chamber I call the Star Room, and steps inside. I follow to the threshold, peering through the crack in the door that she failed to close properly. She has her back to me. From the motion of her arm I can see she is moving her hand down from her chest to her belly. The glow gets brighter, throwing black shadows in all directions, brighter still, and suddenly it’s a glare, like a flash of lightning, painting the whole room with an intensity that allows no colour. Mother drops the orichalcum cone with a shriek and I burst in through the door after her. As I run around her to discover what she’s hiding I see she has both hands folded over her stomach, one atop the other. Tears are running from eyes screwed tight.