Somewhere Beneath Those Waves Read Free Page A

the mysteries left by the receding tides of history and cataclysm:
    A fragment of a ballad from Arc ψ19: The Dragon Tintantophel, the engine of Malice chosen . .  . But Arc ψ19 has been lost for centuries, and no one from that array has ever heard of Tintantophel.
    A pair of embroidery scissors, sent to the Museum by one of its accredited buyers in Arc ρ29 with a note saying provenance to follow . But the buyer was killed in the crash of the great airship Helen d’Annunzio , and the provenance was never discovered.
    Two phalanges from the hand of a child, bound into a reliquary of gold wire. This object was found in one of the Museum’s sublevels, with no tag, no number, no reference to be found anywhere in the vast catalogues.
    And others and others. For entropy is insidious, and even the Museum’s doors cannot bar it.
    xi.
    The tithe-child said in its soft, respectful voice, “I saw in the papers today that the Lady Archangel was beheaded last week.”
    The taxonomist’s face did not change, but his hands flinched; he nearly dropped the tiny D. nubis wing-bone that he was wiring into place.
    “They say she came to the Museum last week. Did you see her, mynheer?” There might have been malice in the great pale eyes of the watching tithe-children; the taxonomist did not look.
    “Yes,” he said, the words grating and harsh, like the cry of wounded animal. “I saw her.”
    Then the taxonomist did dream, the tithe-children saw, and they did not speak to him of the Lady Archangel again.
    xii.
    You who visit the Museum, you will not see them. They are not the tour guides or the experts who give informative talks or the pretty girls in the gift shops who wrap your packages and wish you safe journey. They are the tithe-children. Their eyes are large, pale and blinking, the color of dust. Their skin is dark, dark as the shadows in which they live. The scholars who study at the Museum quickly learn not to meet their eyes.
    They might have been human once, but they are no longer.
    They belong to the Museum, just as the dragons do.

Queen of Swords
    Her predecessors’ portraits hang in the antechamber of her bedroom. “A reminder,” the king says. There is space for her portrait to hang beside them.
    The ghosts come to her for the first time on her wedding night, after the sated king has departed for his own chamber.
    They call her sister.
    They stand just inside the doorway, Queen Katharine and Queen Isobel, each wearing a wedding gown as sumptuous as that which hangs now in the new queen’s wardrobe, each cradling her own severed head in her bloodstained hands, and they call her sister.
    They whisper to her in voices like the tapping of branches at the window. They tell her she is beautiful, as they were; they tell her that she will recognize her own successor merely by the light in the king’s eyes. They tell her not to be jealous, not to be afraid. They tell her they will welcome her gladly to their company. The queen imagines standing next to Queen Isobel, the weight of her own head in her hands. She imagines calling her successor sister and shivers.
    The dead queens appear after each of the king’s conjugal visits. They drift closer and closer as the weeks go by, trading bits of their unceasing threnody back and forth. Once, she tries to speak to them, but they will not break their chain of words to answer.
    In the fourth month of her marriage, the new queen and her physicians determine that she is pregnant. The king is delighted. “I thought I was cursed to marry only barren women,” he tells her that night, his weight pinning her to the bed. He expects no response, and she offers none.
    Later, alone, she waits, heavy with guilt. She has succeeded where Queen Katharine and Queen Isobel failed. They called her sister, and she has betrayed them.
    But the dead queens do not come, and eventually she sleeps.
    She wakes in the middle of the night. Queen Katharine and Queen Isobel are standing at the foot of her