Chapter 16 #2
“My father,” I echoed, faintly. “My father is—detained? And he said—”
“Well, no, actually he said something like ‘The boy—tell him I—never mind.’ Eloquence must run in the family. I chose to communicate the spirit of his remarks.”
I thought of all the headlines I’d ignored for the last year, the raids and protests and mass arrests. I thought of my father as I’d last seen him, furious and sorry and old. I thought of the blood I’d seen congealing on the capitol steps—his, I was sure of it, though I couldn’t say why.
Had I been lecturing on my stupid little tour, while the only two people I cared about were imprisoned? Had Vivian known, when she clinked her glass against mine, that my father was shackled in some windowless basement?
I looked at my own hands, and found they were shaking badly. I couldn’t tell if it was another of my fits, or simple rage. “I’m sorry. I should have looked for you.” I swallowed, hard. “If you are in need of legal or financial assistance, I am in a position to help.”
Sawbridge was attempting to close her traveling trunk, apparently under the impression that books might shrink themselves if glared at with sufficient force.
“Thank you, dear,” she said, “but Sylvie and I have decided not to wait around for the next arrest. We’re going abroad—tonight, if I can get this damn thing—to shut—”
I crossed to the desk and added my weight to the trunk lid. There were several worrying pops from the hinges. “You’re fleeing the country? That doesn’t strike you as a little … premature?”
“Speaking as a recent guest of the government: It strikes me as post-mature, flirting with postmortem.”
The latch clicked. Sawbridge hauled the trunk around her desk, marching for the door with her chin high, as if it didn’t bother her in the least to leave behind her research and notes, the desk where she had worked for so many years, the place she had carved for herself in a college where nine-tenths of her students still assumed she was a secretary on the first day of class.
I touched her arm, lightly, as she passed. “Why did you do it? Why would you destroy the grail?”
She made an amused sound in her throat. “I would set fire to the national archives myself if I thought Vivian Rolfe wanted them.” She sobered, looking up at me with an expression I didn’t recognize on her face.
I’d never seen her uncertain. “There’s something wrong with it, Owen, with the structure of it all.
I’ve spent my whole life chasing it and have nothing to show except bad eyes and back problems. But it’s not right, I know it’s not. ”
“What’s not right?” I was careful to keep my voice neutral.
Her lips thinned anyway. “You are a great historian, Mallory, or you could have been. You know that history is mostly happenstance. Accidents piled on top of mistakes, a series of dice rolled in dim rooms by careless hands. It is not a lesson, until we learn it. It is not a story, until we tell it. And every story serves someone.” This was an abbreviated version of the lecture she gave in every class she ever taught.
I nodded, somewhat warily. “It’s why I listen more to material evidence than the written word. Words lie, but—”
“Bones don’t,” I finished for her.
She very nearly smiled at me. “But this—it’s all so neat. The book, suddenly resurfacing. The cup and crown discovered. The prophecy fulfilled after a thousand years. I’m surprised Sir Una herself hasn’t popped out of her grave, Valiance in one hand and the flag in the other.”
A chill crawled down my spine, settling like swallowed ice in my stomach. “What are you suggesting?”
“I am suggesting that someone is telling this story because it serves them. I was given my little part to play and—Savior save me—I played it.” That jagged bitterness had returned to her voice. “Just as you played yours.”
“If you are referring to my translation of The Death of Una Everlasting, a perfectly legitimate contribution to—”
“You know I’m not. Or do you?” Her eyes moved over my face, and I had the old sense of being professionally vivisected. More quietly, she said, “You haven’t asked me where I found them. The cup and crown.”
“Where did you find them?”
“In the tomb of Una Everlasting,” Sawbridge said, and I wasn’t surprised, not at all. For a moment I could picture it so clearly that the cluttered office fell away, replaced by cold limestone and the fresh green smell of ulla flowers. In my ears I heard the snap and pop of tallow candles.
Sawbridge’s voice turned musing. “If anyone had asked me, I would have told them the Everlasting was just a myth, an amalgamation of heroic traditions stuffed into a single character.” She had, in fact, said this often, to anyone nearby, without provocation.
“But then we unsealed the chamber, and there she was. There was her armor, and there was her sword—though if that damn thing was forged in the ancient age, I’ll eat my left boot—and there were her bones. ”
The tremor in my hands was worsening. My head hurt, suddenly and badly, and my lungs no longer seemed to be the correct size. I took sharp, shallow breaths.
“And beside her—placed there long after her death, judging by the sediment deposits—were the grail and the crown. Don’t ask me how they got there.
The Chancellor’s pet priest has produced a letter from the Church archives claiming that Sir Ancel repented on his deathbed and had the items secretly returned, but I’d swear it’s a fake.
Anyway, the grail and crown were only the second- and third-biggest mysteries in that tomb.
” Sawbridge fished a twist of grubby paper from her pocket and handed it to me. “This was the first.”
I unfolded the paper clumsily, and a single cigarette butt rolled into my palm. It had been smoked down to the last pinch of paper and tobacco, then ground flat beneath a boot heel, but I could still make out the crumpled edge of a tiny silver star.
I stared and stared at it, remembering the taste of cheap tobacco in my mouth.
Sawbridge said, softly, “I don’t know anyone else who smokes those damn things. And I’m telling you, that tomb had been bricked up for hundreds of years. I don’t…” She shook her head once, sharply. “I don’t know how or why any of this is happening, but I sure as hell know who it serves.”
I couldn’t seem to reply. My blood was rushing in my ears, and the walls around me felt tenuous and unconvincing, like cheap stage props.
I heard Sawbridge say, dryly, “Enjoy the coronation.” Then, softer, “And take care, Mallory.”
Then she was gone, leaving me with nothing but a faint heat against my cheek, as if she had kissed it before she left, and a cigarette I’d smoked a thousand years ago.
I didn’t remember everything, not then.
But I knew, finally, for certain, that there was something I could not remember—and once I knew that, it was only a matter of time. Sawbridge used to say that a good historian tells us what’s in the records, and a great historian tells us what isn’t. And I had been a great historian, once.
I tucked the cigarette butt in my coat pocket, gathered up the remains of Sawbridge’s papers, and went to work.
I barely left my office for the rest of the summer.
It was restful, in a way; I declined every invitation and engagement.
I asked—loudly, in several crowded faculty meetings—to be excused from teaching duties, as I was busy working on my new monograph.
A history of the First Crusade, I said, intended for a popular audience.
My colleagues recoiled—if I would stoop to popular history, what depravity might be next?
fiction?—but I had the somewhat paranoid idea that one of them might send a discreet telegram to the Chancellor, and that the Chancellor might decide she had nothing to worry about from me.
I worked methodically, without rushing; it seemed to me I had all the time in the world.
I began with the earlier fragments of the Everlasting Cycle, moving steadily up through Lazamon and Montmer, guided by Sawbridge’s private notes.
I’d read it all before, of course, but this time I tried to see it as a story told over and over, rather than historical fact, and to wonder who it served.
A pattern emerged, hazily, like one of those pictures that doesn’t come clear until you unfocus your eyes. I don’t want to bore you, but consider:
In Lazamon’s compilation of legends—the earliest complete version of your story—it isn’t the Hinterlanders who betray Yvanne, but the Norns.
This legend was recorded just before the Nornish Plot, which resulted in the death of a king of Dominion and all his heirs.
The only survivor was the wife of his youngest son: Tilda the Younger.
Several centuries later, de Meulan composed her Everlasting Psalms—based, she claimed, on The Death of Una Everlasting, which had been given to her by an angel.
Lazamon had mentioned God only in passing, but de Meulan spent long verses on your piety and chastity.
It was the first time you were referred to as a saint.
The psalms were written during the reign of Lysabet I.
She was under pressure from her archbishop to marry and give the throne to her husband or son, but she refused—in the name of Saint Una the Virgin.
The archbishop was found to be a heretic and burned, as part of the spiritual cleansing of the country.
It was during Lysabet’s reign that the last of the Gallish temples were destroyed, and the Roving Folk were driven south.
It was Montmer’s Dominion Historica, in the early modern period, which first named the Hinterlanders as your killers.
When a Dominion ship was sunk, shortly after, everyone knew it must have been the Hinterlanders: They were, after all, Dominion’s oldest enemies.
Our first war with the Hinterlands began shortly thereafter.