Chapter 3 #2
I looked at him, with his pinkish-white complexion and his hair the color of underbaked bread, and marveled that he had never truly noticed the difference between us.
He didn’t seem to understand that a man like me would never be wholly beyond suspicion, no matter how ardently loyal, while a man like him would never be wholly condemned, no matter how faithless.
That I had always hated him, just a little, for the privilege of his deviance.
I answered, in my coldest Cantford drawl, “No, thank you.”
My father would have said something else—I had never in my life gotten the last word—but someone touched my right elbow and said, “This way, sir,” with the professional unobtrusiveness that I associated with spies or very good waiters.
“Excuse me,” I said to my father, and turned away with profound relief.
His voice followed us into the building, asking why I wasn’t angry and how I slept at night, and finally, plaintively, as we approached a nondescript door, “And why the hell are you wearing that coat? It’s hot as the devil out.”
The spy/waiter led me through the door, where I was handed off to an even more unobtrusive person, who took me through a series of hallways that ended in another door, which was attended by someone so masterfully unobtrusive they seemed to blend into the plaster.
They turned the knob and announced, deferentially, “Corporal Owen Mallory, ma’am.”
I had a fleeting impression of wealth—velvet drapes, waxed parquet—before my eyes landed on a heavy desk and, sitting behind it, a woman.
I’d never seen her before in my life, but I had the brief, disorienting sense that I knew her.
I knew the sleek brass of her hair, styled so perfectly it might have been strapped on, like a helmet.
I knew the clear blue of her eyes and I knew—I knew—that voice: “Thank you for coming, Corporal Mallory.”
It was the thank you that did it. Suddenly I was back in the field hospital after the dunes, listening to that voice thank me for my sacrifice to crown and country.
I froze two steps across the parquet, contorting into a panicked gesture somewhere between a salute and a bow. “Oh my God, ma’am—Minister Rolfe—”
A low laugh, which managed not to be mocking. “Call me Vivian. Sit down.”
I settled myself, carefully not imagining what my father would say if he knew his son was on first-name terms with Vivian Rolfe.
She regarded me across the polished expanse of her desk. She was always perfectly composed in her speeches and appearances, no matter what the opposition said or did.
But now she looked a little harried. Two of her nails had been badly chewed, and the starch had gone out of her collar, so that it lay limp against her collarbones.
She set a slim cigarette between her lips and leaned minutely forward. An awkward beat passed before I fumbled the matchbook from my coat pocket and cupped a flame between us. The light settled in the hollows of her face, finding the skull beneath her skin. I couldn’t tell how old she was.
She exhaled a long white plume and said, pensively, “You’d think it would have been enough. There were losses, to be sure, but we won. Our oldest enemy, thrown down! If I were a man, he’d be crowning me by now.”
“Ma’am?” I offered, intelligently.
She cut me a wry, pitying look. “Chancellor Gladwell has asked for my resignation. I made that boy—does he think he would have been reelected without a war?—but now they’re whining about the budget and the cost of reconstruction, and they’ve found just the woman to blame.”
“Oh,” I said. In the silence, the faint sound of chanting could be heard from the window.
Vivian rubbed her temples. “And those bastards simply refuse to shut up.” I tried not to blink, because I’d read somewhere that blinking was a sign of guilt. She added, wistfully, “I’d have them rounded up like cattle, if I could.”
The dispassion in her voice sent a chill over my scalp.
My father had so far suffered no worse than a ritualistic series of arrests and fines, but suddenly I could imagine his body splayed on the capitol steps, the butt of a rifle raised above him.
I made a mental note to remind him to start using a more difficult cipher for his letters and pamphlets.
Vivian tapped her cigarette twice on the lip of an ashtray. “But nothing is ever handed to us, is it, Corporal Mallory? This country may not believe in me anymore”—a self-deprecating laugh, only slightly bitter—“but I’ll be damned if I stop believing in it.”
“Ma’am?” I said again.
Vivian rolled her neck from side to side, and when she looked at me again a subtle transformation had taken place.
Her spine had stiffened and her shoulders moved back, so that the points of her jacket drew a perfect line in the air.
All the irony and weariness had leached from her face and left behind a quiet, earnest zeal. She looked both younger and much older.
When she spoke again, it was in the flowing, modulated voice I heard on the radio.
“Our country is at a crossroads. Finally, after centuries of strife, we stand as Yvanne imagined us: a nation united, at peace. But peace is a fragile, fleeting thing. It must be protected, fought for, defended against all threats, native and foreign alike—and I fear we have grown weak.”
I felt I ought to nod, so I did.
“I don’t refer only to the obvious dissidents—at least they care, in their misguided way, about the future of the nation.
It’s the disinterested, the doubtful. It’s the empty pews in our churches and the apathy in our schools.
The young people who don’t know where we came from or what we fought for.
We’ve forgotten—as a nation, as a people—who we are. ”
All of these were lines from her speeches, which left me with the sweaty, trapped feeling that I was the only person in the audience of a one-woman play. I wished, passionately, that I’d taken off my coat.
But then Vivian pulled something heavy from a drawer and set in on the desk between us with the muted clack of wood on wood, and I forgot about my coat.
A book. The book. I leaned toward it, pulled by whatever secret gravity had sent it to me in the first place.
“I read your article about the grail. Brilliant work.” (When Professor Sawbridge had read that article, she’d sighed for a long time and said: You may be a patriot or a historian, Mallory, but not both.) “You argued that a nation is not a boundary on a map or a flag on a pole, but only a story we tell about ourselves.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“It’s a hell of a story, isn’t it?” One of Vivian’s fingers, long and delicate, touched the cover.
It was not a reverent or thrilled touch, but the casual, possessive gesture of a reader to her favorite book.
“Honor. Courage. Tragedy. The villains cast down, the hero triumphant, the rightful queen restored. And yet, it fades. The people forget. It’s time we remind them. ”
She traced the circle of the device on the cover and then, abruptly, slid the book several inches toward me. “You have served your country well, Owen Mallory.” She met my eyes and her voice fell nearly to a whisper. “Are you the man who will save it?”
Some latent desire in me—to kneel, to surrender myself to some grander purpose—to erase the ignominy of my origins and earn my place at last in the grand tradition of Dominion—unfurled inside me.
Vivian Rolfe looked at me so steadily and for so long that I felt the light contract around us, so that I imagined the shadow of a crown on her brow, felt the phantom weight of a blade on my shoulders.
I nodded, because I had an awful certainty that if I spoke my voice would be choked with tears.
“I knew you were.” The warmth in her voice, the absolute certainty—as if she was not at all surprised by my answer—sent a flush of pleasure through me.
“It was you, wasn’t it?” I sounded boyish, overeager. “Who discovered the book.”
She dipped her head in grave approval. “We’ve been excavating the ruins of Cavallon Keep for years now.
A few weeks ago, we found a vault, and in the vault was a locked chest, and inside the chest …
Well.” I hoped the archaeologist had gotten to say By Jove at least once.
Vivian continued, “Can you imagine? People have been searching for centuries, scouring every crypt and castle, and only now—in Dominion’s darkest hour!
—does it reveal itself. It’s providence.
Fate. The hand of the Savior Himself, I sometimes think. ”
“And then you … mailed it to me?”
Her expression turned indulgent. “Forgive my little test. If you had gone to the press, or tried to sell it—but you didn’t. You kept it secret, treasured it, labored over it. That’s how I knew you were the right man to tell Una’s story.”
A new and delicious sense of my own significance filled me.
I’d never been picked first for anything in my life, and now the Minister of War—or at least, the former Minister of War—had chosen me to translate the greatest historical artifact in Dominion’s history.
Visions of honorary degrees and book tours danced in my head; becoming the Middle Dominion Faculty Fellow; Harrison combusting from pure envy; my father clapping me on the back and saying, You’ve changed my mind about everything, I’m so sorry for my decades of embarrassing radicalism.
“I—I’ll try, ma’am.”
“Excellent! Go ahead then, no time like the present. Get in touch when you finish your translation.” Vivian ground her cigarette into the tray and reached for a letter opener, as if our conversation was over.
I stood clumsily, dizzy with awe. “Yes, ma’am.” My hands shook as badly as they had in the war, as if they were approaching a battlefield instead of a book.
The cover was cool and smooth as stone. I felt Vivian’s eyes on me again, perhaps wondering why I lingered. But a strange anxiety gripped me, a sense that some trick was being pulled. I opened the book carefully, praying the college archivist never found out.
And then I went very still. I wet my lips twice before I could speak. “The pages.” I cringed from the hoarse whistle of my voice. “The pages are—”
“Blank? Yes.” Vivian spoke lightly, with humor, twirling the letter opener in her fingers. The point glinted.
I had the sudden, inexplicable urge to hit her. For a moment I saw it so clearly in my mind—saw my knuckles splitting against her perfect white canine, blood overfilling her mouth and sheeting down her chin—that I recoiled from myself.
“Why,” I asked, swallowing, “are they blank?”
She leaned over the desk, smiling peacefully. Beneath the tang of cigarette smoke, I smelled something sweet and a little familiar, like summer flowers. “Because you haven’t written them yet,” she said, and then she stabbed the letter opener through the back of my left hand.
I did not scream. My vocal cords were too knotted and scarred to produce anything louder than an eerie, breathy howl, like the keen of a dog. I tugged dumbly at my hand, but the letter opener had sunk into the pages below, pinning it there.
Vivian leaned closer. Her expression was still peaceful, perhaps even sympathetic. “Your country needs you, Corporal.”
I watched with a sense of unreality as my blood spread over the empty paper like a red map, an empire in bloom. I looked quickly away, but something had gone wrong with my vision.
Everything in the room felt translucent, impermanent, as if the paint of the world was fading and peeling away in great strips.
I closed my eyes. I smelled pine and snow, now, instead of flowers.
Vivian’s voice came to me from very far away, softly urgent. “She needs you, Owen.”