Chapter 15
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 was aware, as I unwrapped it, that I ought to be filled with awe or terror, or at least the simple thrill of discovery. But all I felt was an odd ache in my chest, and a sudden, sharp pain in my left hand. I flexed it twice, but the ache remained.
I tucked the book under my arm and left my office immediately. I knocked hard into Harrison as I rounded the corner, not even pausing to apologize.
I was halfway home before it occurred to me that I might be suffering from another of my delusions.
As a boy they’d been dismissed as flights of fancy—I would wake screaming that my feet had turned black or come home full of stories about a girl I met in the grove—but they worsened during the war.
For the week after the battle at the dunes I’d refused to speak or swallow, to the bafflement of every field nurse and doctor.
They’d had to tie socks over my hands so that I wouldn’t claw my own throat bloody, searching for a wound that wasn’t there.
In the end they’d decided I had suffered some mysterious head injury—I’d been found crouched over Colonel Drayton’s corpse—and sent me home with prescriptions that didn’t work and a medal I didn’t deserve.
There was a boy seated beside me on the train. He had very long, reddish lashes.
I found myself opening the book, asking in my smooth and edgeless voice, “Can you read this?”
He couldn’t, of course, but he liked your device on the front.
He expounded on this subject for a while, and I listened with that strange panic rising in my throat.
I felt wildly, inexplicably fond of him: I liked the high pitch of his voice, which he tried and failed to lower; I liked the stubby shape of his fingers; I liked his mismatched front teeth—one full-size, one still a baby tooth.
I forced myself to stand at my stop. The boy nodded at the book. “What’s it called?”
I pictured him reading it one day. Pictured him enlisting, shipping out, fighting, killing, dying, another hero of Dominion.
Something swelled painfully in my chest—fury, I thought. I didn’t answer him, but fumbled for my wallet and shoved the entire thing into his small, scarred hands.
It took me three days to translate the first page.
I don’t know why. Perhaps I was ill—my head hurt badly whenever I read more than a few sentences, and I couldn’t keep warm, though the air in my flat was hot and sour as boiled milk.
The pain in my left hand had settled into a dull ache between the bones of my middle and ring fingers, which persisted no matter how I wrapped or bound it.
The bandaging provoked another one of my little delusions—I could feel the ghosts of other hands around mine, the rasp of calluses that didn’t exist—so I threw it away.
I was plagued, too, by a strange, listless futility. I would find myself crawling back into bed before the sun had set, or chain-smoking at my desk, watching the clock as if I were waiting for something.
On the sixth day I cabled Professor Sawbridge. She never wrote me back. I wish to God I’d wondered why, or made inquiries, or gone looking for her—but I didn’t.
On the seventh day I went out for cigarettes and milk.
A man spat on my boots and I smashed the milk bottle across his face.
It occurred to me, as I watched him sputter bloodily at my feet, that I was hugely, incandescently angry, and had been since the moment I unwrapped the book, since before that, since always.
I returned to my flat at a near run. I burst back through the door, breath whistling in my chest, filled with a wild urge to rip the pages from the spine—but the book was gone.
In its place there was a crisp white card, bearing no name, but only an address.
I held the card and thought, grimly: Finally.
The streets surrounding the capitol were empty, oppressively quiet.
The white marble steps were littered with odd trash: trampled pamphlets, snapped poster boards, a single shoe.
Near the top there was a pool of something reddish and gelid, which I stepped carefully around. I thought, for no reason, of my father.
An unmemorable, polished sort of person was waiting for me at a side door. I followed them through a series of unmemorable, polished hallways, until we reached an office with four guards posted at the door.
The woman inside—handsome, ageless, with metal-yellow hair and very blue eyes—greeted me warmly. “Thank you for coming, Corporal Mallory.”
“Vivian?” I said, as if the Minister of War was the mother of an old school friend. Her smile didn’t waver, but she blinked once, and I went dizzy with shame. “That is, ma’am—Minister Rolfe—”
“Vivian is fine. Sit down.”
I sat.
“Our country,” she said, “is at a crossroads.” Then she talked for a while about the war and the nation and the glory that was within our grasp. I had the sense that it had once been a very good speech, but that it had been delivered too many times, and gone stale.
I found myself watching Vivian’s mouth. Every so often her lips would move in a way that allowed me to see her left canine, which was badly chipped, the tip jagged, the bone gone grayish and dead. I stared at it until my knuckles began to throb, fiercely.
I became aware that she had stopped talking some time ago.
I jerked my eyes back to hers and found her watching me with the tolerance of a teacher for a bright but wayward pupil.
“Why don’t we cut right to it,” she said, gently, and drew a square wooden object from her desk.
The book landed between us with a hollow wooden thock, and my pulse leapt urgently in my throat.
Whatever I had been waiting for was very near now.
Vivian tapped the cover. “A discovery like this is too important to leave to the ivory tower types. Sir Una belongs to the people. To that end, we intend to commission a translation, to be published in the spring by Satford the rest of me watched coldly, from a great height.
“What an honor,” I said, because I was supposed to. “And Chancellor Gladwell—”
“Was murdered by radicals twelve hours ago. You are speaking now with Chancellor Rolfe, but let’s not get bogged down in the details.”
I waited for shock to arrive; it never did. I said, faintly, “I see.”
The Chancellor of Dominion crossed her arms on the desk and leaned toward me.
Her expression became almost comically severe, like the queen of hearts in a deck of cards.
“You have served your country well, Owen Mallory.” Even her voice changed, the accent turning oddly archaic. “Are you the man who will save it?”
This was the moment, I thought, for a show of emotion. I made myself swallow, as if overcome. I nodded.
Vivian’s face relaxed again. There was something unsettling about the way her expressions shifted, a fractional delay. “Excellent! Let’s go ahead then—no time like the present, is there?” She clapped her hands twice, very loudly. The door opened, and the unmemorable person said, “Chancellor?”
Vivian issued a series of instructions, but I barely heard them. I was reaching for the book, sliding it across the desktop. My left hand was hurting so badly now it was difficult to make my fingers close around the cover.
I opened the book. For the first time since it had arrived in the post—for perhaps the first time in my life—I experienced true surprise. “The pages,” I said. “The pages are—” I swallowed, this time in genuine and wholly inexplicable distress. “Not blank.”
Vivian gave me a quizzical smile. “Well, I should certainly hope not! Did you think I gave you a fake?”
I swayed a little. I could smell the clean, wild scent of frost, the green bite of pine.
Behind me, the door opened again, this time admitting a pair of men who both looked like they knew the difference between stocks and bonds. “Ah, Mr. Satford, Mr. Gills. Make yourselves comfortable. This is Corporal Mallory, the young man we discussed.”
The men introduced themselves and expressed their extreme joy to be working with me on a project of such national import.
They produced glossy leather folios and began to turn the pages, describing the terms of their offer in a language that seemed to bear very little resemblance to modern Mothertongue.
What, I wondered, was an advance against royalties?
My hand was screaming now, the pain traveling in hot waves from my wrist to my jaw.
Vivian cut in sometimes with questions and clarifications. The men nodded and made tiny amendments to their papers. I sat in dazed silence, thinking, over and over, for no logical reason: This isn’t how it goes.
But apparently it was. Someone handed me a pen. I signed my name twice and shook three hands. Mr. Satford assured me that a check would be delivered by special courier the following morning. Then everyone stood, so I stood, too.
I reached for the book, but Vivian pinned it to the desk with one finger. “Property of the state, I’m afraid. We’ll get you an office here, and a couple of assistants.”
I nodded because I didn’t know what else to do. Turning away from the book felt like missing a step on the stairs, a sick swoop.