Otherwise by John Crowley Read Free Book Online

before any but they could remember, that looked down on the far-off City and Outward to the Downs, surrounded by the sounds and silence of sweet rocky woods., And he loved above all the ancient garden closed within its walls. Tended and nursed over centuries, its shadowed groves, vined walls, and sudden fountains had become a system of private places, singular yet unified, like states of mind.
    The year was late now in the garden, that was its mood. The dark groves were mostly unleaved, and the intersecting paths were deep-strewn with black and brown. The air was clear and windy; the wind gathered leaves and the voices of distant boys at play, blew rippling waves through the coppery ivy, white-flecked the many fountains with foam.
    How cold it must be now on the Drum, Learned Redhand thought, when even these fountains are blown black and gray… It had been some years now since he had had need to come back to Inviolable, and as he waited now in the garden for the interview he had asked for, he felt himself given over to an unaccustomed sweet nostalgia, a multiple sense of self and season, composed like a complex harmony out of the afternoon, the garden, the fountains—and himself, a boy, a man, in this same season but other years, with other selves in the same skin. It made him feel unreal, rich yet illusory.
    The narrow, flinty archway that led into Inviolable from the garden, high as ten men, had neither door nor gate, only a great black drape of some ancient, everlasting stuff, so heavy that the restless air could barely lift it; it rose a bit and fell with a low solemn snap of one edge, filled again with breath and exhaled slowly. Learned watched go in and out of this door young scholars and country clerks in bone-white robes; smoky-gray lawyers and iron-gray lesser judges followed by white-robed boys carrying writing cases; thunder-gray court ministers and chamberlains with their lay petitioners… And then he stood as one came out, diminutive, and smaller still with age, in gray indistinguishable from black and little different from an old widow’s black cowl, unaccompanied save for a thick cane. They stood aside on the steps for this shabby one, who nodded smiling side to side. Learned Redhand rose, but was waved away when he offered help; he made a graceful obeisance instead. The old, old Arbiter of all right and wrong, the grayest of all Grays, sat down on Learned’s bench with care.
    “It’s not too cold, here in the garden?” Learned Redhand inquired.
    “No, Learned, if you be brief.” There was little about the Arbiter Mariadn that revealed gender, except the voice; all else had grown sexless with great age, but the voice somehow was still the young Downs farm girl she had been sixty years ago. “But before we speak, you must remove that.” Her index, slim as bone, pointed to the bit of red ribbon Learned Redhand wore.
    He knew better than to fence with the Arbiter. As though it were his own idea, he detached it and pocketed it even as he spoke: “I come to ask you to clarify for me a bit of ancient history,” he said.
    “You were ever nice in talk, Redhand,” Mariadn said. “Be plainer. Your faction—I’m sorry, your family’s faction—wishes the oath sworn to the Blacks set aside.”
    “The Protectorate wish it.”
    “Yes?”
    “It’s complex,” Learned said thoughtfully, as though considering the merits of the argument. “By all the old laws of inheritance, it seems Red Senlin’s grandfather should have been King. In acknowledgment of those claims, he was named heir to Little Black. Now the Black faction seems ready to discredit the claim on the grounds that the Queen is with child, though none believes the King capable of such a thing after ten barren years of marriage. The Reds seem ready to force Red Senlin’s claim, and crown him now in repayment for the Blacks’ reneging.”
    “As a matter of principle, I suppose,” said the Arbiter coolly. “Just to set the record