Touching Rainbow familiarly, he added, “And you’ll be here to watch it all, won’t you?”
“You must forgive Twig,” she said, instantly regal. “He has known me since childhood and often treats me as though I were still a youngling. But it’s true I spend most of my time here during the winter. I have no greater purpose in life than to decipher the message of the stars. I want to know why I’m accursed!”
Embarrassed by her intensity, Jing glanced nervously at her escorting prongsman, without whom she was forbidden to walk abroad, and wished he could utter something reassuring about Twig’s abilities. But the words would have rung hollow. He had pored over Jing’s star-maps, cursing his failing sight which he blamed on excessive study of the sun— in which Jing sympathized with him, for his own eye was not as keen as it had been—and exclaimed at their detail, particularly because they showed an area of the southern sky which he had never seen. All he had to offer in exchange, though, were a few score parchments bearing scrappy notes about eclipses and planetary orbits, based on the assumption that the world was stationary, which had been superseded in Ntah ten-score years ago, and some uninspiring remarks about the New Star. It was clear that his real interest lay in what he could himself affect, in his laboratory, and his vaunted theory of the fire above was plausibly a scrap from a childhood dream. Jing was unimpressed.
He said eventually, “Lady, where I from is not believed curses anymore. We hold, as sky tend to fill more with star, so perfectness of life increase down here.” And damned his clumsiness in this alien speech.
“That’s all very well if you admit the heavens change,” said Twig bluffly. “But we’re beset with idiots who are so attached to their dreams they can go on claiming they don’t, when a month of square meals would show them better!”
He meant the sacerdotes, who—as Jing had learned—had been sent to Castle Thorn unwillingly, in the hope of winning the Count back to their “true faith,” and were growing desperate at their lack of success even among the peasants, because everyone in this valley was well enough nourished to tell dream from fact. One rumor had it that they were spreading blight on the trencher-plants, but surely no one could descend that far! Although some of the lords of Forb…
Disregarding Twig, Rainbow was addressing Jing again. “You say I can’t be cursed?”
“Is not curse can come from brightness, only darkness. More exact, is working out pattern—I say right pattern, yes?—coming towards ideal, and new thing have different shape. You noble-born, you perhaps a sign of change in world.”
“But if change is coming, nobody will prepare to meet it,” Twig said, growing suddenly serious. “With the trunks of Forb and other ancient cities rotting around them, people shout ever louder that it can’t be happening. They’d rather retreat from reality into the mental mire from which—one supposes—our ancestors must have emerged. You don’t think Lady Rainbow is accursed. Well, I don’t either, or if she is then it’s a funny kind of curse, because I never met a girl with a sharper mind than hers! But most people want everything, including their children, to conform to the standards of the past.”
“My father’s like that,” Rainbow sighed.
“He’s a prime example,” Twig agreed, careless of the listening prongsman. “He thinks always in terms of tomorrow copying today. But our world—I should say our continent—is constantly in flux; when it’s not a drought it’s a plague, when it’s not a murrain it’s a population shift … Where you come from, Jing, how does your nation stay stable even though you admit the heavens themselves can change? I want to know the secret of that stability!”
“I want to know what twisted my father!” snapped Rainbow. “Bent outwardly I may be, but he must be deformed within!”
Aware of being caught up in events he had not bargained for, Jing thought to turn Rainbow a compliment. He said, “But is still possible to him descendants, not? Surprise to me lady is not match often with persons of quality, being intelligent and of famous family.”