Chapter 3
I BARELY TOUCHED the book, that first day.
I simply crouched in my flat above the butcher shop and smoked an entire pack of Lucky Stars, lighting each cigarette from the butt of the last. It was a habit I’d picked up during the war and continued on doctor’s orders for my weak disposition, and also because it was the only way to overpower the meaty, battlefield smell of the butcher shop below.
I moved the book from my bedside to the desk and back again.
I performed a series of tests—not on the book, but on myself: writing out my whereabouts for the last three days to ensure there were no odd gaps, reciting every monarch of Dominion from Yvanne up to the republic, pinching myself quite hard, et cetera.
I had suffered some little disturbances after the war—forgetting things that had happened only the day before, or remembering things which had never happened, or confusing dreams for memories—but my mind seemed to be in perfect order now.
I went to bed early and lay tense and unsleeping for several hours.
At two or three in the morning I said, aloud, “God, enough,” slipped on a pair of cotton gloves, and opened the book. I translated the first sentence:
It begins where it ends: beneath the yew tree.
A surprising peace moved through me as I wrote the words, an almost mechanical satisfaction, as of a key turning smoothly in a lock. I returned to bed and slept well. I dreamed, and my dreams were all of you.
The second and third days I spent examining the book as an archaeological object, striving for some semblance of objectivity.
It was not at all uncommon for unscrupulous or excitable persons to “discover” artifacts related to Una Everlasting.
Every old tree in every old village was the one from which you first pulled Valiance; every rusted shield was the one you wore on your left arm, a white dragon upon a red field.
Just last week Professor Sawbridge had been called away to investigate a vault beneath the ruins of Cavallon Keep, which might have been your final resting place.
I extracted tiny samples of ink and studied the grain of the wood beneath my strongest magnifying glass. I took meticulous, if inconclusive, notes. Ink is oak gall, hand-lettered—rate of decay indicates early period. Pages are wood pulp. Parchment or vellum would have been more typical.
On the fourth day I opened the book again and worked through the first six pages, and forgot all my fussy, doubtful notes.
Yes, the paper was anachronistic. Yes, the binding was unusual, perhaps even unique.
But the words themselves rang in my head like church bells, and I came to believe that whoever had written them had truly known you, not only as a hero or a saint, but as a living woman.
It was the way he described you, the casual familiarity of it, and the way he sometimes forgot the grander quest in favor of odd, quiet moments of intimacy. But most of all it was the way he mourned you. Grief rose from every page like turpentine, burning the back of my throat.
On the fifth day I made copies of my translated pages and mailed them to Professor Sawbridge, who was still away supervising the excavation of the burial vault.
On the sixth day Professor Sawbridge and I exchanged a series of telegrams, in which she called me a rude name, committed light treason, and cast aspersions on the veracity of the text.
I knew she was at least intrigued, however, because she was taking the early train back to campus, and the only thing she hated more than her country was getting out of bed before ten o’clock.
On the seventh day, I went out for cigarettes and milk. The sun was far too hot and the air was far too fresh, moving around me in great unsettling billows, tugging at my sleeves.
When I returned, with relief, to the stale dark of my flat, the book was gone.
In its place there was a crisp white card, bearing no name, but only an address.
I had never flourished in a crisis. I was one of God’s natural ditherers, much given to the wringing of hands and the writing of unhelpful lists.
Since the war, I had added fits of weeping and melancholic stupors, and every now and then a wave of confused and violent memory that left me curled in a corner, shaking.
I did not dither now, though, nor wring my hands.
I did compose a brief and unhelpful list (1.
Report the theft of a nonexistent book to the police; 2.
Search the room for clues, as they are always doing in novels; 3.
Weeping fit??), but I did not even bother to write it down.
My body was already moving, as if it had decided on a course of action without me.
I donned my old red service coat, then—after a moment’s sweaty uncertainty—removed the coat, strapped my holstered Sinclair service revolver over my shoulder, and slipped the coat back over it.
I tucked two packs of cigarettes into the breast pocket and left the flat with the white card clutched so tightly in my hand that the edges cut into my palm.
I showed the card to the cab driver, who read the address twice, gave me a suspicious, flinty look, then drove in silence to the very heart of Cavallon and deposited me on the steps of a building I’d never seen, but recognized nonetheless, because it was stamped on the back of every coin in the country: the capitol.
I exited the cab clumsily, blinded by the sheer volume of white marble. The air was thick and hot, as if it had been panted from a dog’s mouth; I couldn’t imagine, suddenly, why I’d worn my service jacket.
“Traitors, the lot of you.” It was my driver, leaning one elbow out the window and enunciating very clearly, as if he’d been rehearsing during the drive.
I was not surprised by this statement. The war was over, but the occupation was proving messy and expensive, and there were plenty of people who were thrilled to find someone with brown eyes to blame for it. I also happened to be, by literal and legal definition, a traitor.
But then I saw the crowd gathered at the steps of the capitol, signs and banners waving, and felt a surge of embarrassment instead.
“Oh, no—I’m not with—” But the driver had already slipped back into traffic.
I turned quickly away from the crowd, hunching my shoulders.
I comforted myself that treasonous chanting was probably quite diverting, and there was no reason any of them should notice a panicky scholar lurking nearby.
And anyway, they might not even be affiliated with my father.
Those radical organizations were always dividing and sub-dividing, as if their true purpose was not the downfall of tyranny but the invention of new acronyms.
“Owen? That you?”
I flinched, feeling like a boy caught sneaking out of the house, except that my father had never much cared where I went or when I came back.
I turned, sweating hard, and saw him limping gamely through the crowd, one arm raised.
“Well, if it isn’t my favorite propagandist,” my father said, and smiled at me.
It was such a good smile—sincere but a little roguish, the bags beneath his eyes folding up like merry accordions, as if our last fight had never happened or wasn’t worth remembering—that I muttered, “Hello, Dad.” And then, more stiffly, “What’s all this?”
“Ah,” he scoffed, “some friends of mine. Just a little gathering.”
“A gathering with slogans is called a protest, Dad.”
The smile faded. Without it, my father looked more like what he was: old and tired and hungover, probably in a great deal of pain. He’d always been thin, but now he resembled the scraps one might save for a stray, all bone and gristle.
“That bloodthirsty tyrant—”
“Her title is Minister Rolfe, and as our first female Minister of War I think she deserves a certain degree of respect—”
“Oh-ho, does she show respect for the women who’ve died in her munitions factories—which she refuses to investigate, because they’re owned by her nasty industrialist friends?
” I often imagined my father would have made a good solicitor, if he hadn’t taken up anarchy instead.
“The union girls invited her to speak at one of their meetings and do you know what she called them? Poison!” My father shook his head.
“She wants to be Chancellor, if you ask me. Thinks we’ll all just go quietly along with it. ”
He added a scornful ha!, but the truth was that I’d spent the last several years going quietly along with it.
It wasn’t hard; I simply never read the papers or listened to the wireless or voted.
I declined every invitation to veterans clubs and kept my Medal of Valor in my loose change jar.
If it wasn’t for the dreams and the shaking fits, I might have been able to pretend I’d had my throat slit in a terrible archival accident.
My father was still talking. “But I can tell you our pamphlet circulation is up two hundred percent! Not everyone wants to see their tax dollars support an illegal occupation. Not everyone was happy to waste their sons on a ridiculous war—”
“Some of us shed a lot of blood for that ridiculous war,” I interrupted, in that especially priggish tone I seemed to reserve solely for my father. “Some of us fought for crown and country—”
“A country with colonies is called an empire, son.”
We regarded one another unhappily for a little while. The chanting continued shamelessly on. The sun shone heartlessly down. I was very conscious of the strap of the holster beneath my coat, and the sheer insanity of bringing a weapon to the capitol of Dominion.
Eventually, my father offered, with gruff resignation, “There’s extra signs, if you’d care to join us.” Behind him two men were unrolling a long banner that read: VETERANS AGAINST WAR!
“I thought you were the Veterans for Peace.”
“Don’t you mention the VFP in my presence. Class traitors and sycophants, all of them.” My father softened, leaning close. His breath rose in fumes between us. “What do you say, son?”