Capítulo 18: Vivianne – Village of the Dead
Vivianne went alone into the tunnel. Prince Clément begged her to come back, but Vivianne plunged into the darkness. She’d normally hold his hand and carry a lantern. They liked to explore the Rock together. Or rather, she liked to explore the castle and he liked to tag along.
The royal castle of Deran was in the south face of a black mountain, which clashed with the usual Deranian landscape, green and ondulating, with blue canyons and icy, cristaline waters[M1] [L2] . Even the Wave, much higher than the Rock, had a whitish-blue, cold hue. It gave the impression that it was slender, but Vivianne couldn’t be sure: she saw only one side of the mountain range. Slender and flexible but also unbreakable.
‘Don’t leave me out here alone,’ Clément called.
Vivianne was angry with him. They had such an angry argument when she arrived at the Rock, that she forgot to pick up a lantern. Instead, she took a broom, removed its handle, and used it as a staff to feel the floor in front of her.
‘If the Rock helped to defend Deran from Farheim and Inlang,’ she had shouted, ‘fewer people would die.’
She and Marcus had patrolled the Wave’s skirts together with two hundred soldiers. It was the first time Vivianne accompanied her brother. Lune was the only one defending Franária from the North, but Deran was broad and the Wave had thousands of rocky veins through which the enemy could come down to the green ondulations between the Rock and Lune. Often, Lune’s soldiers came too late, and the soldiers found villages inhabited by corpses.
Clément was ten years old. He had not been crowned king yet. Vivianne was also ten. She was Master of Lune, just like her brother, who was six years older than her. Vivianne didn’t understand why Clément did nothing. She didn’t know the difference between growing up under the protection of Queen Adelaide and being raised by the Wraith. Not even Clément understood that difference yet.
Years later, Clément would still be protected by his mother, but he’d find a way to force Queen Adelaide to send soldiers on patrol. At thirteen years of age, the king will begin to run away from home and force his mother to send soldiers out to search for him. By then, itwon’t be necessary anymore. Very soon, Farheim and Inlang will stop raiding Deran. Even so, Clément will run away. Maybe he’ll only run away because there is no more danger. When Vivianne and Clément turn thirteen, Vivianne will wonder if her friend and king would have the courage to explore the Deranian canyons if Farheim and Inlang were still a threat. She even asks him, but Clément says:
‘I don’t know.’
To forget the lantern was careless. Even at ten years old, Vivianne was not careless. She blamed Clément for that as well. If the Rock helped Lune to fight off Farheim and Inlang, Vivianne wouldn’t have had to feel that small.
A few months earlier she heard Marcus and the Wraith talking.
‘Should I take her with me?’ Vivianne’s brother asked. ‘It’s sometimes ugly out there.’
‘Do you wish to protect her?’ asked the Wraith.
‘She’s a child.’
When this conversation took place, Vivianne was nine. They were in the library and hadn’t noticed Vivianne drawing maps of Lune on the floor, behind one of the shelves.
‘You’re fifteen,’ said the Wraith.
Vivianne couldn’t read his tone of voice. Why would he say something obvious like that? The Wraith went on:
‘You want to protect your sister, but hiding is not the same as protecting.’
‘But to expose her to the dead…’ Marcus didn’t know how to finish that sentence.
Vivianne took a peek at her brother through the gap between books and shelf. What she saw on his face squeezed something inside her chest. She wasn’t good at reading people, but Marcus wasn’t well. Many years later she would remember that moment and would still be unable to read his expression, but it would dawn on her that Marcus, at fifteen, was still a child. And he was exposed to the dead.
‘Your sister is your ally,’ said the Wraith. ‘You may hide the world from her, but can you hide her from the world?’
Marcus twisted his hands. He had strong hands now, big and rough. Hands shaped by the sword. To a nine-year-old girl, he looked invincible.
‘She can stay in Lune,’ said her brother.
‘Vivianne is an explorer,’ said the Wraith.
‘All she does is draw!’
‘Castles and architectures. She has sketched Lune from several angles, discovered ruins and spaces no one had seen before, and she’s exploring all the castles this library has to offer. One day books won’t suffice.’
‘But Clément never leaves the Rock,’ Marcus insisted.
‘Ah, yes. The future King of Deran is perfectly safe under Adelaide’s protection.’
Marcus took Vivianne on the next patrol, right after her birthday, when she turned ten. Vivianne was anxious to explore the Rock, draw its towers, halls and walls. She had been there twice before but it hadn’t been enough. The girl got excited when the swift brown horse carried her over ondulating Deran; she was amazed by the canyons, which suddenly appeared, previously hidden in the landscape. Deep canyons, camouflaged by the terrain’s uncertainties. Then she saw the dead.
She didn’t know what they were right away. Vivianne had seen dead people in funerals. Clean and peaceful, they seemed to be asleep. These dead screamed. What skin was still attached to their bones stretched in pain and fear. The empty holes in the skulls, where ravens had eaten away the eyes, were shaded with horror.
And the smell. The flies and the smell. When she arrived at the Rock, Vivianne yelled at Clément until her throat was sore. How dare he? How dare he stay with her at the Rock while his people were reduced to that smell?
‘I didn’t know,’ said Clément. ‘I didn’t know.’
‘How could you not know?’ Vivianne forgot that, until that trip with Marcus, she didn’t know it either.
Alone, she entered the tunnel. Little by little, the smell of stone erased the smell of the dead. The silence of the rock smothered the flies, and Vivianne started carefully touching the broom to the ground so it wouldn’t disturb the silence. The darkness was blue.
The tunnel entrance was three hundred meters below the Rock’s lowest tower, but you couldn’t see the castle, which was on the south side of the mountain. Vivianne saw the tunnel when she and Marcus arrived from the north. For the first time since the village of the dead, Vivianne thought of something that wasn’t flies. She still didn’t know much about architecture, but there was something wrong about the Rock. It seemed incomplete. The castle wasn’t perched on the black rock like an eagle; it came out from within the mountain like a tree.
Where were the roots?
The darkness was blue and death. This death had no smell, but it dried in Vivianne’s nostrils and made her face cold. It had a breath. This breath went under Vivianne’s skin, through her hair, cooled her skull, licked her spine to the base. Vivianne shouted, dropped the broom, and shrank to the floor.
The blue death caressed the folds in her ears, pinched her left heel, iced the spot between her brows. Vivianne forced her body to unfold and stretched an arm to hold onto the wall. She didn’t know anymore what way was the exit. She didn’t know that there was an exit. She grabbed the wall and pulled herself up. A piece of rock detatched from the wall and Vivianne held it tight.
Suddenly, the broom rattled and there was a scream, followed by a body falling against Vivianne.
‘Vivianne, is this you?’
It was Clément. He had stumbled on the broom and fallen over Vivianne. He grabbed her arm and pulled her away. Outside the tunnel, he bent over his knees. He shook harder than Vivianne and breathed heavily.
‘I think I peed,’ said the prince.
Vivianne’s voice was an ice cube at the base of her throat. She felt pain in the palm of her hand and opened her fingers. She was still clutching the piece of stone that had fallen from the tunnel’s wall. Vivianne and Clément stopped trembling. The piece of rock was a delicate sculpture, representing a frog sitting by a standing fox. The fox’s pointy ears left two red marks on Vivianne’s hand, like a tiny bite.
Clément held Vivianne’s hand, as though the weight of that stone were too much for her.
‘You went into the tunnel,’ she said.
‘You screamed,’ he said.
