* Author : Kate Heartfield
* Narrator : Alyson Grauer
* Host : Summer Fletcher
* Audio Producer : Peter Adrian Behravesh
*
Discuss on Forums
Originally published in Lackington’s.
Rated PG-13.
A Thousand Tongues of Silver
By Kate Heartfield
I am a book. My pages are purple.
This is how they made me. First, they flayed the calves, stretched and scraped their wet skins. Then they mixed lichen and leaves, rotted in human urine, to mimic the purple that comes of torturing sea snails to force the desperate spew of sedative. Soaked my pages in all that stink until they turned the colour of violence.
Then I was ready to receive the quill. Letters of suspended silver ink, with plenty of copper to prevent tarnish.
Why silver, you may ask?
Well, look how beautifully it shines against the purple. Isn’t that reason enough? It was reason enough for Amalasuintha. She didn’t question it.
Do you see the letter ? That is the letter the scribes call . It means the number 60, sometimes; it also means “year.”
The year of my conception was 534, by some reckonings. Let’s go there. To the city of Ravenna, on the northern coast of the Adriatic Sea. A woman perhaps forty years old rules all of Italy and much of the rest of Europe too. Her father’s kingdom. But her father, Theodoric the Great, King of the Ostrogoths, is long dead.
And when her father died, she was herself already a widow, and her son was a mere child.
So Amalasuintha rules — in her son’s name, but no one has any illusions, least of all the man who is brought to Amalasuintha in chains.
“Theodahad,” she says. “Cousin.”
She is wearing a stola of purple silk, gathered at the shoulders with two magnificent eagle brooches that leave most of her shoulders bare. At her ears, two more eagles dangle, silver inlaid with precious gems in all the colours of the world.
He is wearing fetters.
“Cousin,” he echoes. “Is it really necessary to bring me here in iron?”
“Was it really necessary for you to overrun all your neighbours’ land? Every farmer in Tuscany has come to me to complain about you in the last few months, Theodahad. I don’t have time for this. You’re stealing their land?”
He shrugs. “If they can’t see fit to protect it — ”
“You’re better than this.”
He isn’t. He knows he isn’t. Theodahad has always been the problem in the family. The product of her aunt’s youthful dalliance. Italian born and bred, but never quite accepted anywhere. He’s a decade older than Amalasuintha, and when he lets his long hair fall in front of his face to hide his snarl, it’s streaked with silver.
Then he tosses it back. “We always have to be better than everyone, don’t we, cousin? Better than the Romans, because we’re Goths. Better than the Goths, because we’ve taken the Roman throne.”
“We? You’ve taken nothing. Except for some hills and some goats.”
His face moves like an earthquake.
“How is your son, cousin?” he asks. “How is the king? He will be old enough to take the throne soon.”
She doesn’t miss his implication. He doesn’t miss the pain that rakes its invisible claws over her beautiful face.
Amalasuintha sinks into a chair of carved, dark wood. A Roman chair.
“Theodahad, if they had only let me have the raising of him! He was such a marvellous child.
