17th feb.

Princess Claudia

Once upon a time, in a kingdom not very far away from this one, lived a lonely
princess. She hated being a princess, as she had to wear uncomfortable shoes
and tight silver pins in her hair. Every day she would have to study queenship
and politics, and every night she had to attend formal parties in her tight
shoes and shiny pulled-up hair. She loved to hunt deer in the forest, and live
off the land (in summer), eating roots and skinned rabbits, and drinking from
streams. However, this holiday was only allowed to her one week a year, and
even then she had to take her maid with her.
She could also not marry whom she pleased, or even when she pleased, but
had to consider men and boys within her own circle. They turned up at these
balls, danced politely, made good conversation and left the next morning,
wrapped in furs, but entirely without her heart. She could not complain about
her life, as she was much wealthier than the people around her, and she was
being taught many a useful and interesting lesson by her tutors. These were
the best in the world, and provided her with the sharpest girls in the land to
compete with intellectually. Still, when her feet hurt and her scalp felt pulled
from its roots.

One day, as she was walking in the Water Garden between the palace and the
pavilion, she spotted a dirty face among the trees. It seemed to consist of
nothing more than a pair of blue-black eyes and a round nose, and quite
shamelessly watched her walk from one end of the wooden decking to the
other. She would have run towards it, but her ceremonial dress was not
waterproof, and her shoes were mere silver wires. Whoever owned the eyes
was very skilled at keeping themselves hidden, as the princess (whose name
was Claudia, couldn't see a single finger clinging to the trees, or a hint of
teeth. The thin blue eyes and the fat nose seemed to float unaided through
the branches, turning only to watch her pass.

The ball was fairly interesting. Her beautiful dream-thin dress was much
admired (although she was always worried about ripping the damn thing on a
chair leg or catching the thin train in a door-hinge). She danced and talked
with a whole regiment of suitable men, many of whom she had never seen
before. Some of them could talk about art and alchemy with her, and even
seemed to take her opinions seriously. In fact, a certain dukelet from far away
stayed dumbstruck by her side for hours, asking question after question about
the ancient metrical system for death elegies. However, he was not a brave
man, and even disdained dancing as being a waste of intellectual energy.
Another man, who ran her round the ballroom like a hound on a country
squirrel-hunt, couldn't stay still long enough to talk, and waved his vast russet
hand at the thought of discussing school-lessons in the evening. She ate ices
and danced as well as her wiry shoes allowed, and in the quieter passages,
she avoided romantic dances and close contact by talking in velvet-curtained
corners with expert students on one subject or another.

The dancers encouraged her to dance more, and the scholars begged her to
enter an academy and further extend her studies, but she had her own three-
field kingdom to rule, and was only supposed to attend the balls to gain a
consort. This ball was no different to any other. The long hall shone with
crystal, and the dust had been flitted from all the picture frames. All the
women were in thin embroidered dresses, and all the men were in dark velvet
suits with fancy buttons. The band played in the corner, hired from the
academy, and hissing arguments kept breaking out between scholars about
the next song and whether it was 'rubbish' or not. Along one wall sat the old
ladies, alleged chaperones, who dressed up in trailing lace outfits a hundred
years old and talked about the worthless decadence of current dancers.

This ball was already enlivened by the face in the trees and by the fact that
Claudia had met some other fans of death elegies (sonnets were more the
thing at the moment). It was further enlivened when she bumped into Temmy
at the food table. He was balancing a plate of peeled grapes under a plate of
flaky cakes and trying to refill a port glass with the other hand. His suit was
slightly over-green and his buttons seemed to be made of small insects. He
greeted her warmly, and asked about the man-catching prospects.

"Nothing here I want" she said cheerfully.

"Can't you just pick someone passable and just spend all your time in the
summer palace?"
"It's the principle of the thing. I know I'll have to give up and marry one of the
buggers one day, but it isn't this year/"
Temmy rolled a grape into his mouth.
"If you were married, you'd have a lot more freedom. You could wear whatever
shoes you liked.," he thought, chewing, "…up to a point"
"But then I'd have to go to the married balls, which have much worse music,
and some really stupid conversationalists."

"But I shall be crowned when I am married, and I'll never be able to study or
hunt again. Unless I Unless I sneak out and do them by moonlight."
"Well, said Temmy, "That's always a possibility. Personally,. I'm grateful I was
categorised early as an alchemist, and I'll never have to go through with any
of this nonsense."
"I am a bit alchemical myself, sometimes "
"No, you just like to think you are"
She swirled the sweet wine round her glass.
"I think I should set a challenge for the boys. They have to hunt a large animal,
dance a reel and then write a commendable death-elegy for the dead beast.
The one who can do all that well, I shall marry"
I Temmy cocked his head, tipping more grapes down his throat.
"You're not that big a prize, sweetie. But…"he looked at her fierce expression,
"…they might do it for a laugh"
She nodded. "I shall make the announcement now, and the first test will be
seeing who's sober enough to remember the next day."
She strode off to the bandstand.

Now, it has been mentioned that Claudia's kingdom was rather small, and that
she would rule it herself, with the man as mere prop and service-mate, but she
was still worth prizing. Despite her over-academic tendencies, and her distaste
for alluring female clothing, she was fairly pretty, highly amusing, and showed
great promise on the dancing-floor. Several young princes, bored of the
summer scene raised heavy eyelids to listen to her challenge.
As she stood on the podium, keeping her dress-train away from the music
stands and trying to stand very still, she could see several pairs of eyes raised
from the general slump, calculating, hopeful or just mildly intrigued. One pair
in particular seemed to float behind the bubbled-glass window, thin and
intense, in some unseeable colour.

She let the dance band play on, slowly picking up an old summer-tune, as the
centre floor cleared of dancers, who took their practice steps to smaller places.
As the host princess, Claudia couldn't take part in any smaller-scale dances,
and had to sit headachy and bored in the main hall. Soon it was time for her to
creep out (the party officially ended with her) and run along the path back to
the palace.

She stopped by a stone bench and took off her silver wire shoes. She had to
unpeel some of the wires from her skin, and the joy when her feet finally
reshaped was enormous. She couldn't help herself from sighing with joy, as
she rubbed the cramped balls of her feet and unrolled the tiny wires from her
toes. She wriggled her toes a little in the leaf-mulch, and tried to unpick her
equally wired hair. As she sat with her hands among her hair, she spotted the
tree-person again. The tiny eyes seemed to be laughing at her from
somewhere in the distance, and she called out to them.

"Come out of there, I won't have you punished! But please come out and tell
me how you hide like that!"
There was no change in the staring, and no sound from the creature, which
she believed might not even be human.

"Please come out!", she cried, "I have a terrible headache, and I'll only wonder
all night about you instead of sleeping!". But there was no movement. She
shrugged and kept on walking. There were palace guards everywhere, but she
didn't want to be a snitch for some creature that might be a child having fun.
She picked up her trailing train and made her way home, with small soft sighs
as her bare feet hit the lawn.

The next morning (or nearly afternoon) she awoke to find several buffalo-skins
on the end of her bed and a small pile of letters. They were all gifts from the
Fiery Scholars Hunting Club, who had entered the marriage competition en
masse as a joke. Although, as several highly detailed sonnets mentioned, they
would take winning very seriously.
"Dammit, I said elegies", she muttered as she read well rhymed hunting
sonnets over
her toast.

Her maid, Sonji, who was married quite happily, and had chosen the man by
the usual dancing-till-exhaustion method, began a running commentary as she
unpicked broken wires from Claudia's hair.

"Lord Glinhint sent a dozen red rhinos and an elegy this morning. He must
have hunted straight through and not slept. The rhinos are certainly a hard
target, and it's always handy to get the buggers off the lawn, but you don't
want to marry a man who rhymes 'blood' with 'love'. It's bad psychology."
Claudia could hardly speak for the squeaks of pain, but managed to utter
something about the third part.
"It's worth while to give his dancing a test. Perhaps he can take poetry classes
when he's married."
"I thought it would all boil down to the dancing," said Sonja gas she brushed
out a wiry knot.
"Well, you'd hardly want to marry a man that couldn't dance, would you?
Anyway, today is my mathematics day, and I haven't studied a thing, thanks
to that stupid ball. Could you please pass me my textbook?"

The mathematics class was suitably hard and unbiased. The tutor, Dr
Clammier, complained about Claudia's lack of preparation and complimented
Dora Sugared for the precision of her algebraic metaphors.

Halfway through the class, a herald came in to announce the death of the last
remaining corkline killer, and to perform a touching death-elegy upon the sad
occasion of its passing. Dr. Clammier was not pleased, and fined Claudia with
extra three pages of homework (this 'home' being another part of the castle,
probably her retiring room). She apologised to the doctor, and hurried off to
her dancing-class.

Finally, the day ended. The various animal corpses were sent to the butchering
room, the poems sent to the secretary for annotating, and Claudia could finally
get down to some serious reading. She walked into her furthest chamber, after
brushing her hair and teeth, and rubbing her feet, and found another body
flung onto the bed-end. This one was a human man, small-boned and gold-
haired, and very much alive. There was a piece of bark next to him with
unreadable scratching on it.

"Who in hell's name are you?" she demanded.

He couldn't say much, as he was tied up with a cloth in his mouth. She untied
him, without waking up the guards or anything dull like that, and asked him
again. He still didn't answer. She looked at the piece of bark more closely.

"I wish I knew what language this was," she muttered.

Some of the symbols appeared to be Rallimian, but apart from that it may as
well have been modern art.

The boy (or whatever you called them at that age) raised his eyebrow at her.
"I heard you were meant to be some sort of scholar", he said in a perfectly
normal (and thus rather surprising) voice.

She scowled at him, and glanced at the bark again, before remembering what
he was doing there.

"Who brought you to my room? And why did they do it?" she asked, tidying the
room subtly as she spoke.

"If you read the note you'd understand," he said "I was left here as the
captured-beast part of your little wedding challenge, and right there is the
death elegy"

"But you're not dead"

"Ah, but 'tis living death for my sort to be captured" he said with fake
seriousness.
"Really. You seem remarkably calm about it."

"I'm an explorer, and this might be the only way I'll ever see a princess's
bedchamber," he said, looking round at all the velvet cushions. Claudia also
noticed his gaze rest on the piles of textbooks and crystal animals on the
shelves, and the untidy heap of silk dresses by the bedside. She had always
insisted on tidying her own inner room, unfortunately.

"Well, once you've finished looking, you can escape back outside and I'll
register you as dead. If I can translate the poem, your captor could even make
the second round. And what kind of wild creature are you anyway?"

He smiled neatly and touched his tiny gold necklace.

"My kind have never been caught or catalogued, they hardly even live in
legends. My people have always existed - as far as I know - and yet are but a
rumour. " He sat up and gave her a far sharper look. "We plan to go
overground one day, once we get the whole… never mind…"

He stopped talking suddenly, and looked out the window at the dark trees.

"Look, this 'I feel like I'm dead' thing is just rubbish, but I'll let your friend or
whatever still enter if he brings me something nice and bloody tomorrow
morning."

The boy nodded, but didn't look happy about it. "Any particular species?" he
asked sarcastically.

"No, not really fussy as long as the coat's unmarked and it's fairly healthy. Oh,
and do tell him to learn some normal dance steps, I don't want another joke."

He bowed his head deeply and climbed through the window, onto a nearby
tree. He seemed to be very good at leaving high-up rooms in a hurry. Claudia
watched his shape through the leafy blackness and decided that he was the
creature watching her earlier. Which was pretty obvious when she thought
further about it. She wondered for a moment why he'd let himself be tied up
like that, and went to bed.

The nest morning, there were even more bad poems to greet her, written by
good peons, and a pile of thick furs, sent by more forward-thinking chaps.
There would be dancing trials this evening of all the best hunter-writers, which
proved to be interesting. She was going to wear her softest shoes for the
dances, and whatever music she chose. And she might wear her hair down for
a change.

That morning in literature class she showed the bark to Dr. Groon. He scowled
at it for five minutes before going off into a rant about old Mesiac playwriting
and the need for more funds. He said he couldn't translate the bark, but knew
for a fact it was one of the four hidden languages as indexed by him alone
thirty years ago.

Claudia thanked him for the information, and started to straggle through a
translation of ancient law reports. The morning passed slowly, and the lunch
break wasn't any better.

She had the afternoon free to work on her appearance or wander the grounds
admiring the landscaping. After a quick face wax she ran down to the water
garden to look for that boy again. If he knew someone who knew the hidden
languages, then he really was as odd as he claimed. Or maybe Dr. Groon was
full of crap, and the hidden languages were written by normal people, same as
anything else, only with far stranger grammar. It was a fascinating topic, and
she was very keen to discuss it with mystery boy. And get his name, and why
on earth he wasn't cold wearing so very little.

She hurried to the garden and sat on the curled stone bench next to the
millpond. She dabbled her hand in the weeds. Suddenly the tree boy was there
on the bench next to her.

"How do you keep doing that?" she squeaked.

"It's a special skill of my people, " he murmured.

"Oh… what is your name, by the way? Or do 'your people' not believe in
them?"

He stared calculatingly at her for a while, then mumbled to himself.

" 'Jake'…?" he tried.

" 'Jake', you're saying. And this is your real name? No, I suppose not, it would
ruin the mystery. You know you're only wandering these grounds because I
haven't told the guards you're here? Pretty damn good of me, I think. There
are plenty of princesses who aren't as nice, I can tell you"

"You're not being nice, " he said slowly, "just curious"

"So your friend, or your master or whatever will be at the dancing tonight?"

"Well…"

"He's not coming? Are the dances not obscure and weird enough for him? No
mystery hidden dances and creepy steps to explain to the boring princess?"
she asked, talking to herself mostly.

"Well…" he said, looking slyly at her from under his dirty beige fringe, "you
see, I kind of tied myself up. It took quite some effort but we're good at that
sort of twisting. And I wrote the poems a couple of years back about the trials
of being caught and exhibited. It's cheating, I know, but I just had to enter…"
His voice trailed away and he sat poking the earth next to her feet.

"I don't know what to think about that" she said " it's very clever, but it's so
clever it approaches devious. I know, I'll let you enter if you run off this
afternoon, catch me a… oh… a mouse and write a couple of lines on it. Just for
the form of the thing.".

"Fair enough" he said, and shot off into the undergrowth.

The rest of the afternoon droned on, with a semi-formal dinner (no books
allowed and some talk of politics, but thankfully loose hair) and a visit from her
cousin Tallia, who had heard of the wedding challenge, and could talk of
nothing but her new carriage and its flaws. For hours they sat in the Gold
room, drinking chocolate and discussing the worthlessness of wheelwrights.
Claudia tried to bring up her own concerns, but they didn't receive much
sympathy, compared with Sienna's sore bottom. Claudia kept waiting for a
butler to come in with a dead mouse on a tray, but nothing came. There
wasn't even a regular animal, as the flood of corpses had died down somewhat
since yesterday.

Finally, Sonji came in to ask Claudia to dress for her dancing-trials. Sienna
couldn't stay, and had to leave in her terrible vehicle. Claudia raced upstairs,
glad to dress up for once, and chose a greenish dress with buttons all down
the front, and a simple slip-noose in her hair that would come free at a touch.
Sonji brushed some gold dust on her face and tied flower-stems to her
underclothes. Claudia was just dabbing on some red-powder when she spotted
a fly in the pot. It was a huge buzzfly, quite dead, with a little roll of paper
stuck to its back. She fetched a magnifier and looked at the paper. On it was
written, in tiny neat capitals:

O FLY /TH'ART DIED/YOUR BEAUTY/UPROOTED/DUSK COME/LIKE SUN/ALL

'CAUSE/YOUR BUZZ./THE NOISE/ANNOYS.

"So he's entered - and it's a death elegy!" she said to herself, although Sonji
overheard her and sniffed.

Claudia raced downstairs to sit in the receiving room, so she could get to know
the applicants a little. Three Fiery Scholars were already there, prodding each
other in the ribs and making side-bets about her dancing skills. She took the
first one, a keen angler, into the ball room and started the dancing process.

He was almost too polished, but she managed to stop the dance early and try
another one. It was going to be a hard evening. All the while, as she passed
from one to another, she looked out for 'Jake' and wondered what insane
dancing methods he'd practise.

It came to midnight, and she was nearly sick with exhaustion. She had danced
with the ten best poets and seven best hunters on the list and re-draped her
hair about thirty times. Some of the hunters were highly skilled, and taught
her some intricate new steps. The students (except for the three Fiery Scholars
members) were more relaxed in their dance styles, but had sweeter faces.
Lord Glinhint had really surprised her.
Sonji came to undress her for bed at about dawn, and still no sign of the
mysterious woodland 'Jake'. Claudia walked through the colonnade to the
sleeping palace, watching lazily as birds flitted in the trees and beetles ran
beneath her feet. The glass overhead reflected the light greenly, and she felt
deeply relaxed. It was a good plan to test consorts so thoroughly, and she had
many new furs and bad poems to look at. Lord Glinhint had offered to show
her his special dancing skills even if she never married him, even after, and
she had been offered honorary membership of the Fiery Scholars on account
of her hair-flying dedicated footwork. Now to bed, where surely the strange
'Jake' would be lurking with some clever plan for a dance.

He wasn't there.

She slept well and continued her routine the next day, studying, wearing silly
clothes and testing dance-partners all night. At three she slipped outside for,
she claimed, some fresh air. She padded to the water garden and began to
search the vines and bushes for a sign of him. He wasn't there, but she did
find a palace guard asleep under the flower tree. She walked back to the ball
room, where her current partner was waiting.

The next night was the same, and the next month. She had gone through her
shortlist and her long-list (she was really enjoying learning new dances) and
was trying hard to forget the tied up boy and the dead buzzfly.

One night, after a heavy session dancing with the 'can't rhyme at all' list
members, she lay in bed feeling suddenly stale. It wasn't the silk bedroll or the
feather blanket, or the blend of fourteen scented oils burning in a corner, but a
sort of mental boredom. She wasn't studying for any exams except her far-
distant queendom, she had no social duties due to the dance contest, and she
was starting to get bored of that. There was some other reason, but she
turned to the pillow and ignored it.

She had a sudden feeling that someone was in the room with her. There was a
tiny harmonic to her breathing noises as if they were being matched by some
hidden being. She sat up and loudly said

"I know you're in here, come out!"

'Jake' unmelted from the chair and sat on the edge of her bed.

"I don't like dancing in public" he mumbled.

"I always take care to lock the ball room," said Claudia casually before
remembering, "…where have you been for all this time?"

"Part of the process" he said. "I'm sure you want to see my dancing skills quite
a lot now"

"Yes, we can do it on your magnificent flyskin rug." she said sourly, but she
was pleased.
He began to explain, in a tiny voice, just how his people liked to dance. He
showed her a few steps, bit by bit, one movement at a time. They weren't
radically different, but they had a certain texture she couldn't quite catch. The
starlight bounced off his hair and his little necklace and not much else. She
explained how she liked to dance and he understood perfectly. The fourteen
soothing oils still burned and the thin window hangings waved in the smoke.

He stopped dancing and sat back on the chair.

"I'll come back in a while, for the cropping" he said in a neutral tone.

She lay back on the bedroll weakly.

"…I think you've probably won," she said lazily, "…why not stay around for the
coronation before disappearing back to your own people?"

He smiled, the starlight shining along his teeth

"My people don't marry and they don't wear crowns".

"So why did you enter the competition then?"

"Just as I said. I wanted to look round a princess's bedroom. The dancing

lesson is extra"

"So I should marry someone else?" she wailed.

"Yes. And quickly." He parted the window hangings and leapt onto a nearby
tree - fairly nearby.

Claudia raced to the window, but he had already shrunk to a golden dot in the
distant treetops. She went back to bed discontentedly and tried to pick out a
substitute husband that wouldn't mind the odd gentleman caller. It certainly
wouldn't be Lord Glinhint.

Two weeks later she married Meryck Denison, poet (of sorts), hunter (of stoats)
and blue-eyed charmer of the Fiery Scholars Trumpet Band. The nation
rejoiced and began a series of street parties and civic decoration programmes.
Claudia wore her finest wiriest shoes to the wedding and twisted her hair into
a filigree ball some eight inches wide. The princess and her consort took a
month's holiday in the north tower, which had its own garden and bathing
pool, and Claudia was so content she didn't even ask for her textbooks.

Tonight, her first public night after the wedding holiday, she was going to the
first married ball. She slipped on her softest silk shoes and bluest suede robe
and fixed her hair in a long tail, bound with white ribbons. As she applied gold-
powder to her hair she had to continually wipe beetles off the table. They
crawled up the legs from some hole in the corner and seemed to form patterns
on the surface, drawing curly lines in the spilled dust.

She felt a little odd suddenly, but let it pass. She had felt a lot odd in the last
few weeks. She blamed it on exam stress and the strange cooking habits of
Meryck. He came in about then to discuss his suit colour, and she hissed that
he should have thought of it earlier as it would need pressing. The light
coming through the windows danced in regular stripes, making her dizzy. She
thought of cancelling her appearance, but no one else could come if she
couldn't, so she persevered.