Chapter 10 #2
Only then did I realize the chanting had been replaced by cries of alarm, a rising hum of fear.
An officious voice was warbling through a bullhorn.
I heard the phrases immediate dispersal and failure to comply, but there was suddenly nowhere to disperse to: Men in red jackets were pouring from the alleys, circling the building.
A brief and awful quiet fell over the crowd, which I recognized from the moments just before battle breaks loose. I looked down at my hands and found one of them was reaching for the revolver tucked in my coat. I clenched it into a fist instead.
Somewhere down at the front there was a sound like a brick on meat—and then war broke out.
I’d never been much of a soldier, unless I had a gun in my hand: I stood like a stone in the wild tide of the crowd. Signs were dropped and trampled underfoot. The line of red jackets marched toward us in perfect lockstep, like fascist caricatures sprung straight out of my father’s pamphlets.
I watched them come with a sense of unreality, even irony; how funny it was, that I had betrayed my country and been given a medal, and now, when I was trying to serve it, I would be arrested.
The soldiers were so close now I could smell their aftershave. I would have stood there unmoving until the cuffs closed on my wrists, if it hadn’t been for the hands that shoved me backward, up the steps.
“Up you get, son, by the wall, that’s it.” I wouldn’t have believed it was my father’s voice if I hadn’t smelled the liquor on his breath.
I reached the wall and turned back just in time to see him fall. Maybe his bad hip failed; maybe he was pushed. All I saw was the look in his eyes as he went down: not surprise or fear, but grim relief. As if he knew one of us would suffer, and he was glad it was him.
I lost sight of him for a moment—there were too many bodies pressing between us, a wall of sour sweat and howling mouths. When I saw my father again, he wasn’t moving.
He was draped over the steps, slack-spined, like a rug dragged out for airing.
There were two soldiers standing above him.
My own jacket had faded over the years, but theirs were still a gory Dominion red, collars stiff with starch.
One of them raised the butt of his rifle above my father’s body.
The wood was already stained with something dark and wet.
Would I have done something—shouted, stepped between them, thrown my body over his? I never knew, because a hand closed on my shoulder and hauled me abruptly backward through a door I hadn’t even noticed.
I stumbled into a cool, windowless hallway. The door clicked shut, and the sudden silence pressed like thumbs into my ears.
There was a discreet, well-dressed sort of person standing next to me, regarding me with such professional disinterest they must have taken special courses.
“Please, my father—he’s still out there—” I was breathing hard, nearly panting, and my hands were shaking badly.
The disinterested person remained disinterested. I had an awful sense that I might burst into tears or scream or press my revolver between their eyes, and receive nothing but a politely devastating Sir?
“He’s old, and probably drunk. He didn’t mean anything by—”
But they had already executed a turn so neat it might have been plotted with a protractor. “If you would follow me, sir. She’s waiting.”
The hallway led to a series of staircases.
With each floor we climbed the carpets grew thicker and the wood paneling more expensive.
By the final floor there were paintings of historical monarchs lining the walls: a series of pale, lumpen men whose names everyone got confused, interrupted by much larger portraits of Yvanne the First, Tilda the Younger, Lysabet II.
They seemed to glow from their frames, their hair electric yellow, their skin so white it shone nearly blue.
Dominion has always loved its queens best.
We paused before a door guarded by a pair of extremely grim soldiers, who looked at me as if they would very much like to have me cuffed, searched, and interrogated. The strap of my holster felt suddenly very tight against my chest.
I was swept into the office before I could properly panic. “Corporal Owen Mallory, ma’am,” said the discreet voice. The door clicked shut.
Velvet drapes. Waxed parquet. A heavy desk, and a woman sitting behind it. “Thank you for coming, Corporal Mallory.”
“Oh my God. That is—ma’am—Minister Rolfe—”
“Zero for three, I’m afraid. It’s Chancellor, now. The opposition are insisting on Madam Chancellor, but I think we both know that’s just chauvinism with table manners.”
A merciful pause followed this, during which I recalled the emptied streets and furtive whispers and wished very deeply that I’d bothered to buy a paper or turn on the wireless. Eventually I said, “Yes, Chancellor,” in a voice that cracked only slightly.
The Chancellor of Dominion—the single most powerful person in the nation, perhaps the whole of the modern world—gave me a fond smile. “Call me Vivian. Sit down.”
I sat.
“May I assume, from your expression of owlish astonishment, that you are unaware of recent events?”
“Yes, Chancellor.”
“Ah, academics.” She set a slim cigarette between her lips and leaned minutely forward. I found my hand already holding a match, as if I’d been waiting for this very moment. My vision doubled as I cradled the flame, so that my hands were trailed by their own twins. I blinked hard.
Vivian exhaled dense white smoke through her nose.
She consulted the fine gold watch on her wrist. “Ten hours ago, Chancellor Gladwell was assassinated by anti-colonial radicals. Five hours ago, I took emergency control of our armed forces. Two hours ago, the other ministers voted me in as acting Chancellor.” Her smile tilted.
“It was still close. I won them a war and averted a crisis, and they nearly gave it to the Minister of Agriculture.”
She unfolded a paper and slid it across the desk.
The headline read GLADWELL ASSASSINATED; NATION IN SHOCK.
The rest of the page rippled like dark water in my vision.
Disquieting phrases floated to the surface: anti-colonial extremists; act of treachery; emergency measures.
Most of the other ministers had declined to speak with the press, but Vivian Rolfe had given them their pull quote: The most dangerous enemy is the one we trust enough to turn our backs on.
Be warned: We will not turn our backs a second time.
I said, weakly, “Oh.” I thought of the grim-faced guards outside her door. The sound of boots on marble, and the butt of a rifle poised above my father. “So the protesters outside, as I arrived—”
“Are being interrogated as we speak.”
“But surely they weren’t responsible for the attack. They’re certainly, ah, disruptive, but I know they’re not assassins. Please, Chancellor, my fath—”
“It would not,” she interrupted firmly, “be a wise moment to express sympathies with any radical groups or individuals, or to disclose any familial ties with the same.”
I heard the clack of my teeth as I shut my jaw.
I imagined my father—a drunk and a deserter, who would not be missed by anyone save the barkeep—interrogated by a government who badly wanted someone to blame.
Even if he didn’t confess, they would surely raid his house, and how long would it take them to crack his little cipher of misplaced punctuation and counted letters? I’d broken it when I was ten.
A voice in my mind said: Every story needs a villain. The voice was not mine.
Vivian was still watching me with the detached expression of a jeweler holding a gem up to the light, looking for flaws. I clenched my jaw so hard my molars hurt.
She nodded sharply, screwing her cigarette into an ashtray and squaring her shoulders in the manner of someone who has just mounted a podium. “Our country,” she said, “is at a crossroads.”
Then she told me that Dominion had lost its way. That glory was within our grasp, but that we had forgotten where we came from and what we fought for and needed to be reminded.
There were pauses spaced judiciously throughout this speech, as if for applause. Into one of them I said, perhaps less politely than I should have, “You have the book, don’t you.”
A flash of annoyance in her face, there and gone again. Her smile was indulgent as she set the book on the desk between us. “You have served your country well, Owen Mallory.” Her voice lowered to a throaty near-whisper. “Are you the man who will save it?”
I felt then that I was standing outside my own body, watching the way her words worked on me. The shine of my eyes, the bob of my throat. The pitiful urge to please, to serve; the hunger of a useless boy to be used.
She told me they had chosen me particularly for this work, and I shivered all over, like a dog. She told me they needed me, and I went willingly to heel.
I watched myself and felt nothing but disgust, that I could so easily forget my father’s face as he fell. The weight of a body in my arms—not my father’s, after all—the wet heat of the blood that soaked my shirt, my knees, my hands—
I blinked down at my own hands. Perfectly clean. Perfectly dry.
“—time like the present. Get in touch when you finish your translation.” Vivian spoke in casual dismissal, already rummaging through her desk drawers.
I stood unsteadily, reaching for the book with hands that were not covered in blood and never had been.
I said, “Yes, Chancellor,” but didn’t leave.
I ran the pads of my fingers over the cool wood of the cover, tracing the bent spine of the dragon.
I found my mouth opening without my intention or permission. “Why?”
“Ah!” Vivian held a letter opener aloft in triumph. Then she said, coolly, “Pardon me?”
There was a craven, awestruck part of me that wanted to fall to the floor in apology. I locked my knees against it. “You don’t really need The Death of Una Everlasting to gin up support for the occupation—”
“Reconstruction.”
“—because the assassination will give you all the support you need. You’re the Chancellor of Dominion, now. So why … bother?”
Why bother to slip a significant historical discovery onto the desk of a floundering scholar? Why flatter and entrance him, so that he was half ready to ride into battle in your honor? Why lock up an old, foolish man and his foolish friends?
Vivian didn’t answer immediately. She regarded me with rueful good humor, as if I’d surprised her, not unpleasantly.
“Well, you’d be no good to me if you were stupid,” she murmured.
Then, louder, “I meant everything I’ve said: We are at a crossroads, and we have forgotten ourselves.
This story…” She nodded at the book, still flat on the desk.
“It’s who we are, how we make sense of the world.
I’ve seen early drafts of tomorrow’s papers.
One of the cartoons shows a mob of radicals, and the caption reads Sir Ancel’s Heirs.
There’s also a rather striking drawing of me with a crown—do you think they could ever have conceived of a female chancellor, had it not been for Yvanne? ”
A private smile, then, as if she were sharing a joke with someone who wasn’t in the room. Then she tapped her knuckles briskly on the desk. “But you’re right. I don’t need the book to hold the Hinterlands, or to be Chancellor.”
“Then why—”
“Honestly, it doesn’t matter, because you aren’t going to write it for me. You’ll do it for her.” An insufferable part of me wanted to push my glasses up my nose and correct her verbiage; surely she meant translate, not write.
But she was already reaching across the desk, sliding the book away from me and opening the cover.
My heart stuttered in my chest, then resumed at twice its usual pace. “The pages are—”
“Yes, yes.” She took my hand in hers and pressed my palm to one of those awful, empty pages. “Now, hold still.”
I didn’t scream when she stabbed the letter opener through the back of my hand. I’m not even sure I felt it. I was already falling into the bright, sharp smell of pine and snow.
“She needs you, Owen.”
Then came the yew, the branches bowed with frost, your sword resting sweetly at my throat. Then the dragon and the grail, the courtyard and the queen, the bier and the book.
God, please, don’t ask me to write it all down again.
It’s your turn to tell it, love.