Chapter 10
SEVERAL YEARS AFTER the war, during the mid-afternoon hour I generally put aside to fantasize about setting fire to my manuscript and disappearing into the countryside to raise goats, I received a book in the post.
(I wonder sometimes: What if I’d refused it? What if I’d let it sit on my desk, unopened, or set fire to it, or thrown it out the damned window? But of course I didn’t. I never did.)
I tore away the wrapping. Observed your device carved into the cover and your name on the title page. Concluded unhappily that the doctors had been right about me, after all, and the pressures of academia had proved too taxing for my delicate mind.
They hadn’t wanted to discharge me, even once the war was won.
My throat had healed, and the infection eased, but I’d remained unwell, prone to odd anxieties and lapses of awareness.
I would touch my own cheek and discover I’d been crying without knowing it.
I would wake sometimes from a bad dream to discover I was standing at the sink, washing my hands over and over.
But, as I wasn’t technically dying, they sent me home with several diagnoses, a recommendation to avoid crowds and loud noises, and the Everlasting Medal of Valor.
I’d found ways to lessen the frequency of my lapses, since my return.
I avoided crowds and loud noises; I stayed out of the cold and slept with the lights on.
I tacked a poster of you to the back of my office door, so that I could glance up from my work and remind myself that you were a figment, a fable, a stranger who’d died nine hundred years before I was born.
But perhaps I was getting worse again, because there I was, absolutely certain that I was holding a book which did not exist.
It was doing a very good impression of existing—I could feel the weight of the wood on my palms, smell the wintry scent of the pages, like woodsmoke and frost—but my body was no longer a reliable narrator.
For example: Was I standing on thin carpeting, or deep loam?
Was that ink smudged on my fingers, or did it glint red in the light?
“—you quite alright, Mallory?” The tone (irritable, becoming alarmed) suggested the speaker had asked before; the voice (a solicitous drawl, of the kind they teach at boarding schools) told me who it must be.
“Sorry, Harrison, just distracted.” I set the book on my desk slightly too hard, provoking a small landslide of old term papers and library notices. I made a show of gathering them up again, keeping my hands obscured just in case it wasn’t ink.
There was an expectant silence, which told me Harrison had asked another question. Probably about my manuscript, because he was, as I think I’ve mentioned before, a bastard.
“Oh, it’s shit and you know it,” I said, surprising us both. Our enmity was the type that was conducted through a pantomime of friendship. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I was just leaving.”
“Of course, of course. Mustn’t push yourself too hard—doctor’s orders, I’m sure,” Harrison said, demonstrating that he, at least, had not abandoned the rules of engagement.
I shoved past him, book hidden in my armload of folders and notes, scurrying past Professor Sawbridge’s office and out into the sodden heat of late summer.
On the train home, I sat beside a boy—redheaded, long lashed. About the age I was when I first read your story.
I showed him the book, softening the scrape of my voice as much as I was able. He couldn’t read the title, but he could describe your sign on the cover—at length, with enthusiasm. Not a hallucination, then.
I stood when the train dinged. The boy nodded to the book. “What’s it called?”
It occurred to me that, if I translated and published the book in my hands, he might one day read the title himself.
Perhaps he would dream then of knights and swords and glory, as I had.
Perhaps those dreams would send him to war—the next one, or the one after that—and perhaps he would come back broken, bent subtly out of true. As I had.
Something swelled painfully in my chest—guilt, I thought. “The Death of—” I began, but your name caught like a sob in my throat.
Before I stepped off the train I scrounged a few coins—too many—from my wallet and stuffed them awkwardly into his small, scarred hands.
I didn’t touch the book, that first day.
I drew the curtains and went directly to bed, still in my slacks and undershirt, as I often did. The doctors had listed fatigue among my many symptoms, but I didn’t sleep because I was tired; I slept because I dreamed, and every dream was of you.
They were not always pleasant. I saw you weeping and bleeding, killing and dying. I saw you on your knees and I saw you on your bier, and I woke with tears on my cheeks and a tremor in my hands.
But other times I saw you laughing, head thrown back. I saw you above me, beneath me, pink and urgent, and when I woke, I would touch myself before even opening my eyes, aching for a memory that never happened.
That night I saw you white-faced, blue lipped, a ghost of yourself. You told me to wait for you, but when I woke, I couldn’t recall where.
I smoked two Lucky Stars. I drank a half pot of thin, acrid coffee. Then I opened the book.
Over the following week I fell into a sort of fever, translating without pausing to stretch or smoke, eating only when I felt myself flagging.
I decided very quickly that I disliked the author.
His prose was stilted and portentous in a way that reminded me of narrators at the beginnings of films. And if he had truly ridden at your side, if he had stood in the court of Cavallon as you presented the grail to Yvanne—why hadn’t he saved you?
I concluded he was a fellow coward and could not forgive either of us.
But even a coward couldn’t ruin a story like yours: the wild girl who became a knight; the knight who won her queen a crown and kingdom; the kingdom that would have fallen had it not been for the knight’s love and loyalty.
I wept with pride when you slew the Hinterlanders and clenched my teeth with fury at Sir Ancel’s betrayal, though any child could have told you it was coming.
Ancel was the villain on every stage, the traitor in every political speech, the part no child wanted in the school play.
Professor Sawbridge claimed there was contradictory material evidence of Ancel’s character—a few old tapestries and trinkets that portrayed him as a chivalrous, noble figure—but her article on the subject had been quashed by the Ministry of War.
I mailed her the relevant pages of my translation, along with a note; her replies were apparently too crude to make it past the censors.
On the sixth or seventh day I went out for cigarettes and milk.
It was hot, and the mood on the streets was strange. Half the shops had locked their doors in the middle of the day, and people were gathered in nervy, whispering clumps.
At the corner-store counter a man spat on my boots and called me a word I won’t repeat; from this I concluded there must have been unrest in the Hinterlands and made a mental note not to go out after dark.
I was a proud son of Dominion, but—at night, when it was angry and drunk and no one was watching—Dominion would beat its children bloody.
It was a relief to return to the stale dark of my flat, and to the book.
But the book was gone. In its place there was a crisp white card, bearing no name, but only an address.
The city was even hotter now, and oddly quiet, like a held breath. It reminded me of that final morning before the dunes: hot and silent, full of hate.
The cabbie read the address on the card twice and spent the drive casting me narrow looks in the mirror. I wondered idly if it was my service jacket or my hair, or the fact that I hadn’t bathed or shaved properly in several days.
Half an hour later I stood blinking and sweating on the white marble steps of the capitol building, where a crowd had gathered. It was as if someone had picked up the city and tilted it, so that all the pedestrians slid to the center. They were all shouting.
Behind me, the driver said, venomously, “Traitors, the lot of you.”
In my ears, the noise of the crowd abruptly resolved itself into chants, of the kind I used to yell from my father’s shoulders before I was old enough to understand that protests were futile, shameful affairs that got your scholarships taken away.
I staggered back toward the cab. “Oh, no—I’m not with—”
“Owen? That you?”
I closed my eyes in brief but profound agony. I did not see, but physically felt, the cabbie’s nasty smile as he pulled away from the curb. I inhaled and exhaled twice before I faced my father.
He was moving as quickly as he could, shoving past his fellow protesters, limping badly. There was a disarming urgency on his face, as if our last conversation had never happened and all that mattered was that he reach me.
I pushed my spectacles farther up my nose, suddenly awkward after months of righteous silence. “Hello, Da—”
“Get out, boy! Get away!” He added a violent shooing gesture.
The last time I’d seen my father, in the Queenswald tavern, he’d called me a bootlicker and a child and asked how I could sleep with the blood of my countrymen on my hands.
I’d said, stupidly, “What have I ever done to my countrymen?” before I understood that he hadn’t been referring to Dominion.
I wasn’t truly surprised—I’d looked in a mirror—but I’d never asked about my mother, and he’d never told me, and that tiny sliver of doubt had been precious to me.
He hadn’t even apologized for taking it away.
And now, apparently, he still had nothing to say to me.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” I said, with a condescension so insufferable that Harrison would have been jealous. “Did I interrupt you mid-chant? They’re good, although I don’t know that chancellor quite rhymes with criminal—”
“Go now—she’s called out the fucking cavalry—got us good and kettled—”