Tanith Lee - Claidi Journals 01 Read Free Page A

and bells sounding from the House. We ran.

    ==========
Earlier, I think I said I wondered what you might find interesting, but I didn’t tell you much, did I? I apologize.
    I didn’t, for instance, tell you about the House Guards.
     
    Didn’t want to, probably.
    As we came up on the higher lawns, with our ridiculous tube skirts clutched up to our knees (most unruly) to stop them tearing, the Guards were swarming through the Garden.
    Sometimes you don’t see them for days, unless your lady sends you on an errand into a part of the House where they are. LJ seldom did.
    When I was little, I was horribly frightened of the Guards. I believe some really nice clever person had told me I’d better behave or the House Guards would “get me.” They’re there to defend us: royalty first, naturally, but also the lowest of the low—like servants, maids, and slaves. They guard places in the House, too—the Debating Hall, for example, and the upper stories where the royalty sleep. But they are mostly in their own guard tower, which is one of the highest towers of the House, even taller than the ones I spoke of with hundreds of steps.
    The Guards wear blackest black, crossed with belts of silver and slashed with epaulets of gold. They have high boots shiny as black mirror, with spikes sticking from the heel and the toe. They have knives in fancy scabbards, rifles decorated with silver, and embroidered pouches to carry shot. Medals cover them like armor.
    Now they had on their copper helmets too which have visors and more spikes pointing up from the top.
    They looked like deadly beetles.
    We cowered back among a fringe of rhododendrons, but one of the Guards turned and bellowed at us in a sort of hating voice:
    “Get inside, you damned rubbish!”
    Daisy caught her breath, and I heard another maid start to cry. But everyone was scared already. And we bolted for the House up the terraces and steps.
    The Guards were dragging black cannons on black gun-carriages.
    I saw a maid—Flamingo, I think—accidentally get in their way, and one of the Guards thrust her aside so viciously that she sprawled.
    In order to protect us properly, they were quite prepared to do us harm. In fact they seemed eager to hurt us, perhaps as a sort of practice.
    I ducked under a buckled, black-clad arm. Pattoo was dragging. I caught her and hauled her with me.
    And there was the House, sugary and cute in sunlight.
    The balloon seemed to have vanished.
    Had we all dreamed it?
    No, for the Guards were angling every cannon one way. I could smell gunpowder.
    I’d heard of events like this but had never seen—smelled— one.
    Just then, over a crest of poplar trees, the balloon drifted ‘ back again into sight, like a charming toy.
     
    The Guards roared. They appeared to have forgotten us.
    It seemed crazy to be out in the open, but somehow we stood and gaped up at the silvery bubble I’d mistaken for the moon.
    And in the crystal windows of the House, there was face upon face like piled vegetables, pink, tawny, black, all the royal ones, glaring up into the sky, having pushed such unimportant beings as maids out of the way.
    I grabbed Pattoo again. “Look.”
    “I don’t want to,” she said, and she hid her eyes. Daisy was too scared to look away.
    And I… I couldn’t either.
    Then there was a sizzling sound, and the cannons blasted—one, two, three, four of them. The noise—there were clouds of stinking smoke, and bits of fire splashed all around.
    (Tinder has almost an almond smell, I absurdly thought, like marzipan for a cake…) The balloon turned over, a wonderful fruit disturbed up on the tree of the sky.
    Even like that, it looked effective. But then there was another burst of flame, up where the balloon was.
    And it reeled sideways. And then it began to fall. It looked so soft, as if there was nothing to it—the stuff you blow off a dandelion.
    But when it dropped behind the trees, there came a terrific thud. The ground shook. Smoke