Interstitial
THIRD EPISTLE, concerning the insistence of peace despite borders
Written by the hand of EDWARD by the grace of God King of England, Lord of Ireland, Duke of Aquitaine, Conqueror of Wales,
Hammer of Scots, Uniter of kingdoms, grandfather, father
Smoke drained out of the valleys and moors and was never seen again in such a lacquer, the countryside reverting to its familiar
controlled burns, its celebratory bonfires, its cozy hearths, each of these appearing on the horizon like gentle trails of
seafoam across sand. News of this change in weather pattern reached us while lodging at Peebles, our pocket of peace, where
the sky was already a beaming Scottish blue, yet still I turned my head southward, waiting for something, watching and listening,
greeted by only the sweetest noise—the punctuation of children laughing. Grandchildren.
A sword stuck me clear through the back.
The wooden nub of it slipped around my side and I mimed a gallant death, collapsed and beaten with tickles by soft little hands.
Gilbert and Mary and Elizabeth piled on top of me and for once, without the cushioning of armor, I felt the exposure of my age in my joints, in my shoulders as the children clung to me and by admission of defeat my daughter Joan had to call them off.
I yielded to their terms of surrender, granting each child candied oranges and a rose bestowed by Queen Margaret, and these were my goings-on when a battered mare flanked by soldiers approached from across the garden.
A starved child rode the mare. The mare towed an enormous white effigy, sharpened like a spear, dragging across the grass.
Queen Margaret called the tooth an elephant tusk. She showed me her ivory comb. “Feel the texture,” she said. “It’s the same.”
She sent a servant all the way to her palace at Marlborough to retrieve an ivory platter for further comparison but by the
time he was on his return we had moved on to Berwick and the servant wrote to me saying he was stopped at the border and that
was what sent me into a rage, Margaret’s first of mine to witness. “Stopped at the border.” Be it tusk or tooth I broke it
in half. A crystalline pulp at the core crumbled across the ground. I dug Margaret’s comb out from her hair and snapped that
in half as well. How am I meant to unlight a fire like that? How can I not raise my voice and bark and scream at this encroachment,
this casual treason in my own home?
THERE IS NO BORDER. I could barely scrawl the words myself.
I screamed them into the ear of my scribe, stabbed the pen right through the bloody parchment while everyone—Margaret, the Prince of Wales, Thomas, Mary, the kids, the urchins, the usurpers—looked on, dead-eyed and too young.
I don’t know how to be unseething and unscreaming when they look at me like that, when I see their ingratitude for the land they live in, their assumption that everything there is simply there, because it’s there.
Thousands of countrymen have not died with spears through their heads and swords through their bellies for your parcels to be “stopped at the border.” A border does not exist. A border is a consignment of the devil, and how dare you freely give it to him?
A border should only be an ocean, nothing smaller, like that which lies between us and France, and yet even that I can step over.
I step north, I step south, people pop underfoot like berries and bleed red, their skins like that of thin tadpoles.
There is absolutely no border. How dare he say he’s stuck at the border like some misbegotten cow.
If the servant dares show his face with that plate, both will be split in half.
I digress.
I take strange comfort in the thought of George and the XXXXXX. I don’t believe what Margaret said about the tooth being feigned. It wasn’t ivory. She is young and unbelieving in many
things, as young as everyone is in this world—a world that feels too fragile, constantly newly born. She is pregnant again.
How can humanity refresh itself at such a maniacal pace? As old as I am I feel myself alone in this battle against a slate
that is continuously wiped clean, “borders” repainted like black iron mullions, when in reality they are movable, I have moved
them, I have shattered them; still I bang against these windows, still I walk to all these places. I’ve outlived every horse
I’ve ever owned. I’ve spent every last coin in the treasury. And so the comfort of George, as I was saying, is the unspent
youth I saw in his eyes. They were not deadened. They were fey. I remain haunted not by their depth but by their wide absorption.
With the XXXXXX slain, George’s role is fulfilled, but if a troublesome time befalls this disunited kingdom, I can think of no greater guidance than his to seek.
If he really was from a world still to come, then there is comfort in knowing that there will be children of our children, there will be a continuing branch despite what I only see as a constant culling.
And what I say here about George, I suppose, I mean to say to you.
You who will one day be in possession of these records by the sheer happenstance of our sacred calling.
You who will one day be me and for that I’ve spent your life in so much loathing of you, from fear, from agony, and yes, from love. You, my son. My heart.