Hart's Hope by Orson Scott Card Page A

Urubugala.” It was a good name for the creature he had become. And the name did not displease Sleeve. If it kept him alive, he was happy with it. Sleeve was not one of these weak, proud men who can be controlled by the threat of humiliation. There were times when he even enjoyed the freedom that he won through his fool’s part.
    Beauty’s daughter
    By the water—
    Did you wish
    She were a fish?
    At that Beauty glowered, but Sleeve immediately raised his tunic and strutted toward her, showing off his grotesque genitals. “If you like to be a mother, I’ll gladly sire another!”
    â€œYou are not always funny,” said Beauty. “I don’t like you when you aren’t funny.”
    Sleeve sidled up to her and whispered, “Where is the baby?”
    Immediately he felt an excruciating pain in his head, as if his eyes were being forced out by the pressure of something growing behind them. After a few moments it stopped. He refused to be so easily vanquished. “The baby is dead! It lives in my head!”
    â€œShut up, Sleeve.”
    Sleve drew himself up to the full height she had left him. “My name, Madame Beauty, is Urubugala.” He whispered again. “You are a very quick learner. Was all this in those books you read?”
    Asineth was only fourteen years old—she was susceptible to flattery. She smiled and said, “The books were nothing. They knew nothing. All I learned was how to get the power. Once I paid the price for it, the power was its own teacher. So far, I need only to think of a thing, and I can do it. And the most delicious thing of all is that Palicrovol himself gave the power to me. Gave me the power, but only a woman can ever have it.”
    â€œA man can have it,” said Urubugala.
    He saw the fear leap into her face. She was not secure yet with her power. “How can a man have it, when a man cannot create a child out of his body?”
    Again he answered her in rhyme:
    If we fasten our balls to the walls,
    And then if we feed on our seed,
    The power will come in an hour
    To pee like the sea and to fart like a flower.
    â€œYou are disgusting,” she said. “No man can have a power that is the match of mine. And no other woman, either, for no woman has enough hate in her to do what I have done.” She said it proudly, and Sleeve again hid his fear of her behind mockery.
    â€œI am your minstrel and you are my monstrel. Where is your teeny one, tinny one, tiny one?”
    â€œOh, we had an argument.” Beauty carelessly tossed her head and smiled. “I won,” she said. Sleeve fancied he could still see the blood on her tongue.

4

The King’s Bride
    How the Flower Princess lost her body, her husband, and her freedom all in an hour on her wedding day.
    T HE R OYAL P ROGRESS
    She came to the mouth of Burring with her father’s fleet of tall ships. Palicrovol had a thousand singers meet her at the port. So perfect was their singing that the deafest sailor on the farthest ship heard all the words.
    She was rowed up the river on the only galley that her father ever built, but the oarsmen were free, not slaves, and all of them wore robes of flowers. Every day of the voyage, a hundred women sat below deck, winding fresh flowers into new robes, so that every day the robes were new. And when she reached the great city Inwit, a thousand bags of flowers were released upstream, and all of Burring, from shore to shore, was a pond of petals for the coming of the Flower Princess.
    Palicrovol himself met her at King’s Gate, with the white-robed priests of God surrounding him, and white-robed virgins from the nunnery led the Flower Princess from her father’s ship. Palicrovol knelt before her, and the carriage that met her began the Dance of Descent.
    The Dance ended in the palace, in the Chamber of Answers, a room not opened for a century because it was too perfect to be used. Ivory and alabaster, amber and jade,