The Everlasting — Chapter 21

21

SEVERAL YEARS AFTER the war—what war?—during the mid- afternoon hour I generally put aside to fantasize about setting fire to my manuscript—what manuscript?—I received a book in the post.

No. It was not the affable, chap-cheeked campus postman who delivered the book. It was a handsome woman who smelled, sickeningly, of summer flowers. She was very tall; how had I never noticed how tall she was?

This time, when I saw the book, I felt no awe or terror or ambition. I felt nothing at all. How could I? I had left my heart beneath the yew.

Vivian Rolfe cleared off a corner of my desk and sat, fishing comfortably through the detritus until she found a stray cigarette and a book of matches.

She did not hurry; why would she?

As she shook out the match, she said, “Welcome back to the modern age, Corporal.” Her lips twisted. “More or less.”

I didn’t know what she meant, for a moment. But I soon discovered a brand-new set of memories stacked neatly in my skull, like towels in a guest bathroom. They unfolded all at once, a suffocating mass.

This was not the Dominion I’d left behind. It was not an empire, or even a great power of the world, but merely one fractious, troubled state among many, jostling restlessly against its neighbors. Cantford was not the pinnacle of all learned scholarship, but only a backward little college in a backward little country. There were no munitions plants spewing black smoke into the sky, no grand crusades, no processions of troops in bright Dominion red. We did not have wars, but only petty skirmishes and border disputes.

The current Chancellor was a zealous, sallow young man, who talked often of God and destiny and the days when Dominion’s borders had reached from one sea to the other. I’d heard his speeches on the wireless; they were familiar. I suspected now—observing the woman sitting comfortably on my desk, looking out at the mossy green steeples of Cantford—that he hadn’t written them himself.

Dominion was much diminished, but it still belonged to Vivian Rolfe.

“How did you—” I stopped. In nine years, I’d grown used to my voice, even a little vain of it: It was sweet and resonant, like a struck bell. I had sung our children to sleep with that voice, and later, in the dark, I’d used it to whisper in your ear.

Now it was my old voice that emerged, ragged as a broken fingernail. I touched my throat and found slick, puckered scars. Another memory unfolded: a burglary when I was nineteen, followed by a long fever.

Random, as nothing in Dominion truly was.

I frowned, tiredly, at Vivian. “Was this really necessary?”

“No, but it was prudent. It will be easier for you if everything is as it was, before.”

I swallowed, feeling the foreign-familiar pull of scar tissue, and tried again. “How did you accomplish all this? Without the book, without Una —”

“Honestly, did you think you’d dealt Dominion a death blow?” Vivian blew a neat stream of smoke from the corner of her mouth. “I still had three-quarters of a national mythology and several centuries of hard, careful work. What kind of mastermind would I be if I let the whole of my strategy rest on a pair of pawns?”

She tapped her cigarette twice on the rim of my teacup. The tea inside had long since evaporated, leaving brown stains behind like the rings of a tree. “But—and I want you to think about this, really—if it weren’t me, it would be someone else. I did not single-handedly invent the crown, or the chancellorship. Where there is power, someone will wield it. Is it really so intolerable that it would be me?”

“Yes,” I said, instantly. I could still hear our son’s voice asking why, over and over.

“Oh, don’t be so myopic. Look around!” Vivian gestured out the window. “Did you save the poor downtrodden folk of Dominion from the wicked queen—or did you ruin their favorite bedtime story? Did you strike a blow for freedom, or did you just steal a little bit for yourselves?”

I didn’t know. There were too many versions of history in my head, too many chains of cause and effect—and I wasn’t sure I cared about any of them, really, or if I only cared about you, and a pair of children who no longer existed.

“Well, it hardly matters.” Vivian ground her cigarette into the bottom of the teacup and slid from the desk. “You’ll play your part, whether you go marching or dancing. I don’t think there’s any need for speeches or set- dressing this time, so if you’ll open the book, I can send you on your wa—”

“There you are.” Harrison rounded the corner and began his usual performative slouch against the doorframe. But, as soon as he saw Vivian Rolfe, his body jerked strangely, like a puppet whose strings have gotten tangled.

“Oh,” he said, and then, a little too loudly, “Jeremy Harrison, Professor of History.” He extended his hand woodenly.

Vivian took it. “What an honor,” she said, with the false sobriety of an adult humoring a child’s game of pretend. “But I’m afraid Professor Mallory and I are rather in the middle of something.”

“Of course, of course.” His eyes found the book in my hands— unwrapped, your device perfectly visible—and his features twisted with pure, unadulterated avarice. But he looked back at Vivian, who gave him the faint smile of someone very important who wonders why their time is being wasted, and ducked his head. “Far be it from me to stand between a historian and his duty,” he sneered, recovering his old-money unction, and scuttled away.

I waited for his steps to retreat down the hall before I observed, calmly, “He knows you.”

“I should hope so. I’m the one who paid for every single cent of his education, and all those silly jackets with patches on the elbows.” She took another contemplative drag. “His family are swede farmers, you know.

He’d have been nothing, without me.”

I thought of Harrison’s pure and hateful condescension, almost comforting in its constancy. Of his desperate zeal to prove himself socially, intellectually, and sartorially superior. The product of inherited wealth, I’d thought—but actually the product of its absence.

I asked, “Why?”

“Because the only people you truly own are the ones you make. I made him—from nothing, from filth and obscurity—and so he’s mine. Well, not literally mine.” A sly, sidelong look here. “I was only a mother the one

time.”

It was bait; I declined to take it.

Vivian reeled her line back in, disappointed. “Anyway. The Harrison boy failed to fill your role, obviously, but he keeps an eye on you and your father for me, and that spiteful old woman.” Sawbridge? “And there’s nothing like a good sibling rivalry to keep you sharp. Una fought twice as hard once I made Ancel for her to compete with.”

I thought of Ancel’s face as he died, the rueful, weary expression of a man whose whole life had been spent merely to further the plot of someone else’s story. I swallowed sudden sympathy. “Let Harrison translate the book, when I finish it for you.” Let him have the glory and the big desk, the money and the reputation so unassailable that no one would ever inquire after his family again. “He deserves … something.”

“Why not?” Vivian answered easily, but she had paused slightly before she said it. That pause bothered me very much, I found.

She opened the book, the wooden cover clacking hard against my desk, and drew a familiar silver knife from her hip pocket. “Your hand, Corporal.”

“Wait.” I kept my voice carefully innocent, unshaded by suspicion.

“May I say my goodbyes?”

Vivian frowned a little. She was—and this, too, bothered me— genuinely baffled.

“To my father, and my friends, I mean.” I shrugged to disguise the sudden tremor of my hands. “Since I won’t be returning to this time again.”

Vivian ran her tongue over her canine. “Of course. God knows we have nothing but time. Meet me here, when you’re ready.” She tucked the book

under her arm and handed me a card printed on cheap, grayish paper. It bore no name, but only an address.

Professor Sawbridge was in her office, naturally, because she hadn’t been called away to discover the tomb of Una Everlasting, because there was no tomb to discover, this time. You had died anonymously, deep in the woods, and your body had been buried by rain and rot and small, scrounging animals.

Her office was less grand than I remembered—all of Dominion was— and much cleaner. There were no architecturally unsound towers of books, no bundles of political pamphlets. There were not even any cheaply bound editions of racy novels on her shelves.

She looked up as I entered—and beamed at me. “Mr. Mallory! What can I do for my favorite protégé?”

“I—pardon?” I wasn’t sure I’d ever heard her make use of an exclamation point.

Her smile was very wide, like the painted grin of a marionette. “How’s the manuscript? It’ll win you the endowed faculty spot if you ever finish it.”

I stared at her. “But you hate my book. You called it ‘Grade-A hog swill.’”

A flicker in her eyes, indecipherable. “Hate it? Why, I think it’s a fine piece of scholarship. Just what the country needs.”

I recalled suddenly that she’d expressed similar sentiments, many times, in this version of my life. Because this Gilda Sawbridge had undergone a sudden and thorough change of heart. She was no longer a known radical and thorn in the side of the Cantford Board of Fellows; instead, she was one of the most fervent academic voices behind the new Chancellor. She wrote editorials decrying the corruption of modern Dominion culture, and the lack of national spirit in our curriculum. She had even—and here I knew something had gone profoundly, hideously wrong—described my latest article as “something of a little triumph.”

I sank slowly into the chair across from her desk, where I’d spent so many hours being bullied and berated into becoming a better scholar than I

was. “Oh, Gilda.” My head was aching fiercely. “What the hell did she do to you?”

“What? Who?” She blinked rapidly, as if confused. It was not an expression I’d ever seen her attempt.

I studied her soberly. “The last time we spoke—no, I know you don’t remember it, just take my word for it—you told me there was something wrong with the history of Dominion. I wanted you to know you were right.

It’s been manufactured, all of it, in service to a woman named—”

“Is this some kind of test?” Sawbridge was chewing at her lips. They were dry and scabby, as if she did it often. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I am proud to call myself a citizen of Dominion—”

“No, you don’t have to—”

“And proud to serve crown and country. What more”—her voice split, like an overworked seam—“could you possibly want from me?”

It would have been an entirely baffling speech, at odds with everything I knew about Gilda Sawbridge—except that I’d seen a familiar, weary agony in her eyes. As if her heart were buried somewhere far away, and her every word and gesture was an effort to keep it safe.

Gently, I said, “It’s the archivist, isn’t it?” I’d remembered, in a delayed rush of images from this new version of my life, that Mistress Shaw had abruptly quit her post during my third year of study. “How did it happen?”

Professor Sawbridge seemed to collapse inward, like a punctured rubber ball. She looked, for the first time in all my lives, like what she was: an old woman. “I don’t know how you could possibly … Well, you were always bright, when you weren’t willfully stupid. Harrison caught us in the old observatory one night.” She added, sounding more like herself, “Sneaking

little shit stain.”

“And he … reported you for indecency?”

“I wish he had. Sylvie and I would have lost our posts, of course, maybe spent a few months in the penitentiary, but then … we would’ve been free, wouldn’t we?”

There was wistfulness to the question, as if she wanted me to tell her there was some version of her life where she was happy and safe and unshackled. I felt nothing but sympathy; it was the same foolish, childish

hope that had sent me running for nine long years, and which had brought me back, here, to try again.

Sawbridge made a sound of disgust, directed inward. “No. Harrison told someone, but not the authorities. And then—they took Sylvie away.”

“I’m sorry.” It was almost funny, in its predictability. In all her centuries of malice and manipulation, Vivian Rolfe had only ever found one lever to push, one string to pull, over and over.

“I get postcards from her. I’ve seen pictures—she’s well. She’s taken care of.” Sawbridge flashed me a guilty, resentful look. “So I’ll write a thousand craven little articles. I’ll dance like a goddamn bear if they ask me to. Because, for that, for her, it’s—”

“Worth it.” My voice cracked, falling to a jagged whisper. “Yes. I understand.” I thought there was probably no one on earth who understood better. “Love makes cowards of us all.”

Sawbridge flinched a little. She closed her eyes. “Yes.”

“Listen,” I said, “I don’t know if you’ll remember I said this, but things are going to get very bad, soon.” Vivian had the book again, and soon she would have the story inside it. “Dominion will have a queen again. You have to get out before she takes the throne.”

Sawbridge opened her eyes and propped her spectacles on top of her head. “It’s that Rolfe woman, isn’t it.”

“It is, yes. You might think you’re safe, but she’s locked you up before, and she’ll do it again. And the second she doesn’t need you, she’ll kill you.”

Sawbridge absorbed this calmly, without skepticism or alarm. “Thank you, Mallory. But I think I’ll stay put.”

“But—”

“She has Sylvie.” She said it slowly, as if she were writing out a very simple equation on the board. “If I can’t run with her, then I can’t run at all.

And if you can’t run”—she spread her hands—“then I suppose, if you’ll excuse the melodrama, you stand and fight.”

I sat looking at her for a while—an aging professor of history, nearsighted, slightly fat, and very, very angry—and wondered if Vivian knew what kind of enemy she’d made for herself.

I leaned across the desk and touched my lips to her cheek, as she had once kissed me. “If I don’t see you again—though I’m very afraid that I will—goodbye, Professor. Thank you, for everything.”

She fussed with papers on her desk, not looking at me. “Goodbye, boy.”

She cleared her throat before I reached the door. “About your manuscript, Mallory.” I turned to find her smiling beatifically, as if relieved of a great and awful burden. She said, with relish, “It’s absolute hog swill.”

My father still lived in Queenswald, but he’d long since lost the narrow gray row house. Instead, he’d worked out what he called “a cordial arrangement” with both the barkeep and her husband, which—once I’d interpreted the merry waggling of his eyebrows—I’d found indecent, illegal, blasphemous, and entirely humiliating. It had been the beginning of our worst fight.

Now, as I ducked into the amber-lit tavern, I felt nothing but gratitude, and a certain embarrassed irritation with my previous selves. I’d abandoned my father over and over, in every life I’d lived, and I was about to do it again; at least I wouldn’t be leaving him alone.

It was past supper, which meant my father was drifting between verb tenses, transitioning gently from drinking to drunk. I’d caught him just after the pain eased but before the weeping started, when his cheeks turned a cherubic red and his eyes crimped with goodwill. He used to sing to me, sometimes, in this mood. He had a lovely voice.

He saw me first through the bottom of his pint glass. His eye, magnified by beer, widened suddenly. The expression in it was intimately familiar to me, now: relief and irritation and joy. I’d had children of my own since the last time I’d seen him.

Thank God my heart was elsewhere; it would have hurt badly, just then.

“Well, well!” My father thumped his glass on the table. “If it isn’t the pride of the Cantford Department of Propaganda!”

“Hello, Dad.” He was less changed than Sawbridge had been, in this iteration of himself. I knew from my fresh-made memories that he’d still gone to war and still come back with a bad leg and a baby. He still

embarrassed me; I still disappointed him; we still loved each other, however clumsily. We hadn’t yet had our biggest fight, but we were about to.

My father tilted back in his chair, balancing it on two legs. “What brings you here, son?”

I couldn’t even remember why I’d come, all those previous times. I’d made different excuses: I’d come to request that he stop sending his pamphlets to my campus address, for the sake of my career; I’d come to beg him to rent a flat of his own, for the sake of decency. But actually, I’d come for the same reason I always did.

“Just wanted to see you,” I said, and it was the truth.

My father squinted a little, uncertainly. Then he drew a curled-up magazine from his breast pocket and slapped it on the counter. The Journal of Middle Dominion Studies, issue 3, volume 44. “Read your latest, of course.”

The scorn in his voice had scalded me, once. I’d been proud of that article, and I’d wanted him to be proud, too, despite our differences. What an idiot I’d been: Why else, save pride, would a man who couldn’t make rent subscribe to all the leading history journals? What else would make him dog-ear the pages I’d written, and carry it close to his chest?

“I tried to raise you right. Tried to teach you wrong from right.” My father shook his head, dolefully. “And what have I raised? A bootlicker, it seems! A child, who still believes in fairy tales!” Here was a man who used twice the normal allotment of exclamation points.

I considered him, wondering a little. “Were you—are you trying to pick a fight with me?”

His squint deepened, but my father didn’t abandon his script. “I don’t know,” he pronounced, enunciating very clearly, “how you sleep at night, with the blood of your countrymen on your hands.”

He let this statement hang, full of portent. I marveled. “You were. God, Dad, couldn’t you have found a better way to tell me about my mother?”

But I didn’t think he could have. He was an ex-soldier and a lifelong radical; fighting was the only thing he knew how to do. If he had something to say, he’d shout it. If he had something to lose, he’d hide it. It occurred to

me that our most honest conversation had taken place in a jail cell, across an interrogation table.

My father’s mouth had fallen slightly open. “You’re not—you knew?”

“Yes,” I said, feeling older than myself, older than my own father. “I know everything. It’s alright. You already told me.”

He frowned uncertainly, but a drunk never trusts his own memory. He sat blinking absurdly, like a man who’s shown up for battle on the wrong day.

I’d only come to say goodbye—and to leave things a little better than I had the previous times, perhaps—but I found myself flagging down the barkeep’s daughter. She was full-grown now, and pretty in an innocent, maidenly way that made me hope she didn’t know what our parents got up to in the bedroom above the bar.

I ordered two more pints and she said, “Yes, sir,” in a breezy manner that made me feel a thousand years old.

I slid a glass across the table to my father when they arrived. “Can I ask you something?” He was peering hopefully down into his beer, as if it might help him make sense of this conversation. “What did you want to do with your life, before the war?”

He scratched at his cheek, which never quite managed to be clean- shaven or bearded. “I suppose I wanted to see the world. What small-town boy doesn’t?” I hadn’t. The woods had been world enough, for me. “I was all signed up to work a freighter, when I was drafted.”

The beer was thin and flat. I wondered if the barkeep watered my father’s drinks specially. “Why didn’t you, after?”

“Oh, I thought about it, God knows. But … my leg, you know.” His voice roughened. “And a ship is no place for a baby.”

What happiness my father might have had, he’d sacrificed for me. As Sawbridge had sacrificed her principles for Mistress Shaw. As you had sacrificed yourself, over and over, for your queen.

I thought, despairingly, that love didn’t make cowards of us, after all; it made heroes, and heroes usually didn’t survive.

But I was no hero. I’d run from the war and I’d run from Vivian Rolfe and I was going to run again, no matter the cost. I would let the Hinterlands

be invaded, twice over; I would let the Black Bastion burn. I would let my father be beaten on the steps of the capitol and my favorite professor be thrown in jail. I would hand the whole future of the world to a woman who had murdered you—more than once!—so long as I got to see my own

children again.

I wasn’t myopic; I was heartless.

My father was watching me, concerned. “I didn’t regret it,” he assured me. “Never once.”

I sucked watery beer through my teeth. “Just—as an experiment. If I told you to run, now—if I told you things were about to get much worse in

Dominion, very soon—would you run?”

His face creased. “Without you?”

God, he would break the heart I didn’t have. “Imagine I was somewhere safe. Far away.”

“Maybe,” he said, not looking at me. “Sure I would.”

“Really?”

He snorted. “No.” He set his pint on the table. There was nothing left but yellowish foam, sliding down the glass. “If I told you everything, then you know I did something—awful, once. Something unforgivable. I think maybe I owe—”

“You did your best by me,” I said, sharply. “You don’t owe me penance, Dad.”

“Not you. Her. Your…” I shouldn’t have bought him that beer.

Dampness was beginning to gather, inevitably, at the corners of his eyes. He sniffed, mightily. “And there’s Melly and Bill—they’re good to me, Owen, I don’t care if you disapprove. And what about my Veterans for Peace boys?

Half of them are class traitors, I’ll grant you, but then, none of us came back right, from the war. I—I couldn’t leave them behind.”

He would stand and fight, then, like Gilda. Like everyone else who couldn’t run.

This, I thought, was the reason Vivian needed the book so badly.

Because no throne is held easily, or for long; because a nation is a story we tell about ourselves, and stories change, if you let them. Because where there is power, someone will oppose it.

She would wear the crown again—but she would have a hell of a time keeping it.

I sat with my father until the tavern was nearly empty and his words were slurring into a senseless rise-and-fall rhythm, familiar as a lullaby. I listened and thought. About heroes and cowards and the fine line between them. About you, and our son’s yewberry birthmark. About freedom, which seemed to me now a lonely, foreign thing. Who is free, who loves another?

Eventually the barkeep and her husband came to collect my father, each of them pulling one of his arms over their shoulders, laughing a little, fond and exasperated. The barkeep caught my eye, her smile fading. “He misses you,” she observed, pointedly. I said I was sorry, and thanked her for taking care of him, and of me, when I was a child. She blushed. “Oh, we don’t mind, do we, Bill?” Bill agreed that they did not.

I kissed my father’s forehead and told him that I loved him. He said, “There’s my boy,” and I knew: I couldn’t run, either.

The address on the card did not take me to the capitol building this time, but to a weedy dirt track at the very edge of the city.

The cabbie leaned one elbow out of his window, frowning. His conscience appeared to be troubling him. “You sure this is the place?”

“Yes,” I told him, and he almost didn’t flinch from the sound of my voice. “I know where I am.”

I even thought I recognized the stone by the road, though it was surrounded now by tall, slim trees. You had sat there while I combed your hair around your shoulders. I could feel it now, a white-hot brand across my palms.

It was a steep walk, and the day was already hot. I didn’t mind; soon I would be very cold, and I didn’t have my red service jacket anymore.

I crested the final rise and paused. I had seen Cavallon Keep in its glory, and I’d visited its graveside, nine centuries later. But I’d never seen it forgotten entirely.

There were no buses of schoolchildren or velvet ropes for visitors to form queues. There were no explanatory plaques or chattering tour guides

or excavation sites. There were only the stones, tumbled and moss eaten, and the wet, warm wind, running over them.

I stood looking down at the city below me, at the shiny beads of automobiles and the zippered teeth of the train tracks. The poor downtrodden folk of Dominion, Vivian had called them, but they didn’t strike me as victims. I had seen them send their sons cheerfully to war; I had seen them beaten bloody for protesting it. They had put a medal around my neck for something I hadn’t done, and spit on my boots simply for being born. And they hadn’t been tricked or forced into any of it—they had chosen, over and over, cruelly or kindly, selfishly or bravely.

There was a strange comfort in this, I found. Just as there was no such thing as total freedom, there was no such thing as its total absence.

I turned away from the city and into the jagged green shadows of the Keep.

None of the roofs had survived, and few of the walls. Ash and linden trees had taken root in the old halls, spindly and tall, chasing the light, so that it looked as if someone had tried to cage a forest.

It wasn’t hard to find Vivian; I knew where she would be. She had never really wanted to be anywhere else.

The throne had long since rotted away, but there was still a stone plinth where it had stood. Someone had hacked through the moss and swept the leaves away, so that it shone a shocking white, like bone through skin.

Vivian waited for me there, the book in her lap, head tilted peacefully up to the light. A branch cracked beneath my shoe, and she smiled without

looking at me.

“Ready, Corporal?”

“Yes,” I said. There was little else to say. I was through with begging; she was through with speech-making. There would be no more squirming, looping arguments, no more grasping justifications. I would do as I was told because I had to. Because, she supposed, I had no other choice.

She handed me a spiral-bound notebook, of the kind used by court stenographers and journalists. “You’ll need to make your notes here, this time, for transcription later.” She tapped the wooden cover of the book in her lap. “I’ll be holding on to this, for obvious reasons.”

“I understand.”

She handed me a holstered Saint Sinclair Mark III service revolver, three bullets, and her slim silver knife, hilt first. I took it with a hand that was perfectly steady.

Vivian said, comfortingly, “It’s almost done, Owen. One last time, and it will be over forever.” She was lying.

I said, “Yes, this will be the last time,” and I wasn’t.

I pushed the point of the knife into the pad of my finger and touched it to the page she held open. The cold, clean smell of winter came to me, and the world fell away, and then I was home.

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