Read Polystom for Free Online Page B

kleoo-oona ton kaloumenon
Paflagona ka-a-a-a-ah-ti bursopo-o-olen
. . .
    But she will really have to excuse him. His singing voice is atrocious. He’s very much ashamed of it, and if he hadn’t got carried away in the moment – but poetry has always been important to him. Very important. His father had also loved poetry. But, really, his family; he mustn’t get distracted. Well, on his father’s side he was related to the early Princes of Enting. What else? His great-great-great-really-a-
great
-many-greats-grandfather had purchased the whole of the northern continent. He still has rights of authority over most of it; certain parts have been given away to friends and relatives, but his estate, the Northern Estate, is still the biggest on Enting. His grandfather, his father’s father, had been a hot-headed type; called Polystom too, of course. He fought a duel, you know. There was a famous poet called Phanicles, you know. And the two of them had loved the same woman. So his grandfather called Phanicles out – shot him too, although thankfully for literature not fatally. This grand uncle was called Chruestom. He was an army commander; the General, he was called, although his rank was more properly Count and that outranks general, as of course you know. He received more decorations than any other military man. This was before the war on the Mud-world started, of course, so perhaps his record has been overtaken now. He put down several insurrections, you know, with bravery. Among his current living relatives, there are first cousins who act as Stewards of Bohemia and Berthing; the current Prince is a second cousin; andhis mother’s partner is the mother of the heir to the Princedom.
    He tells her all this, in a tumble of lengthy sentences, and she stands next to him, saying nothing, taking it all in (he thinks) with fascinated absorption. Finally he reaches a pause. He has stunned her with the enormity of his breeding, knocked aside any but the most flibbertigibbet reasons for objecting to marriage. This last word, though, the weightiest of words, has not tumbled from his mouth, however much he has thought it. That really would have been too forward. But it is implied in everything he has said. Surely she realises that!
    After a silence, he starts again. ‘Tell me about you,’ he says, a little awkwardly.
    ‘Me?’ she says, softly. ‘There’s no me.’
    Does this mean, Stom wonders, a little wrongfooted, that there’s no life story worth relating? Or that there is no person behind the beautiful façade of Beeswing’s face and body?
    ‘You ran away from home when you were younger,’ he says. She doesn’t reply to this at first, so he prompts her. ‘Why?’
    ‘I felt buried alive,’ she says, still in her dreamy voice, her eyes still focused on the distance.
    ‘This was with your parents?’
    ‘Yes. Their house.’ She breathed out, a slow exhalation like a smoker enjoying a cigarette. ‘It was a prison. Not
like
a prison, you know, but
actually
one.’
    But she need say no more. His sympathy is entirely hers; his heart throbbing like it too was buried alive and is shouting for attention, ‘Bring me out into the air! Make me known to her now!’
    And, although he says nothing more to her in the canal garden, this is what he does, in effect. He takes her arm and walks her back to the House, and they walk in silence thewhole way because (he is so sure!) they have established a real affinity. And the following day, when he arranges a meeting with his aunt and with Beeswing’s guardian, and the three of them discuss marriage, the sense of the rightness of what he is doing hums in his very bones. And the day after that, when he makes his plans known to her – letting her know of her guardian’s consent, that a message has been sent to both her mothers, that the ceremony would take place by the month’s end – she didn’t say yes, exactly, but she certainly didn’t say no.

[third leaf]
    After the wedding,