Death and the Emperor

Book 1 Chapter III: The Land of the Dead

'Who are you?' said the Caterpillar.
This was not an encouraging opening for a conversation. Alice replied, rather shyly, 'I — I hardly know, sir, just at present — at least I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then.'
'What do you mean by that?' said the Caterpillar sternly. 'Explain yourself!'
'I can't explain myself, I'm afraid, sir,' said Alice, 'because I'm not myself, you see.'
-- Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

"It's very strange, if you'll forgive my saying so."

"What is very strange?" Arásy asked, looking up from her sister-in-law's letter.

The nursemaid fiddled with her apron. "Grand Duke Kilan, my lady."

"Kilan? What's he done now?" Arásy hoped her son hadn't gone off on a picnic by himself again. The last time he did that, the entire household had organised itself into search parties. They were on the verge of calling out the guards when he waltzed through the door, unharmed and unaware of how long he'd been gone.

"It's not so much what he's done as... how he is." The nursemaid looked around nervously and lowered her voice as if telling a great secret. "Ever since his fall, he's been different. Grand Duchess Varan is just fine, now she's stopped insisting she's supposed to be dead--"

Arásy winced. Kilan and Varan had, for reasons known only to themselves, decided to climb a statue. Predictably, they had fallen. Varan had hit her head, and when she came to she had raved about Death taking her away and then bringing her back. If Arásy never again had to hear her daughter beg Death to come for her, it would be too soon.

"--but Kilan has become so strange! He keeps correcting his history tutors, insisting they're getting their facts wrong--"

"All children go through a phase when they think they know all there is to know," Arásy pointed out reasonably. "Some of them even grow out of it."

"--and last night he begged me to stay with him and not let "them" take him. I asked him who was going to take him and where, and he wouldn't answer. He just said he didn't want to go with them "this time". I think you should have the doctor examine him for head injuries, and that's a fact."

"I hardly think that's necessary," Arásy replied. "He's just a child with a perfectly normal (though incomprehensible to you and I) imagination. He'll grow out of it."

~~~~

When his parents had said goodnight to him, and the nursemaid had tucked him in bed and turned off the light, Kilan sat up in his bed and pulled the quilt closer around him. The moons' eerie silver light filtered through the window and its gauzy curtains, casting jagged shadows on the walls.

In these moments, after he was left alone and before Death arrived, Kilan tried to calculate how many hours were in ten years. On the planet of Niorla, days were usually twenty-eight hours long. Nights, therefore, were fourteen hours long. There were four hundred and eight days in a year. This much he established easily; indeed, he had already known it. It was when he tried to work out how many hours of night there were in a year that he got confused. There were over eleven hundred hours in a year. Half of those hours, then, must be night. Did that mean there were over five thousand hours of night in a single year?

He had given Death ten years of his life. She took those years by bringing him to the Land of the Dead every night and returning him to life every morning. It wasn't a terrible arrangement. In fact, he quite enjoyed it when he was actually in the Land of the Dead. The worst part was the disorientation of being half in and half out of each world.