The Everlasting — Chapter 10

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 —”

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.

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