The Everlasting — Chapter 3

3

I BARELY TOUCHED the book, that first day.

I simply crouched in my flat above the butcher shop and smoked an entire pack of Lucky Stars, lighting each cigarette from the butt of the last.

It was a habit I’d picked up during the war and continued on doctor’s orders for my weak disposition, and also because it was the only way to overpower the meaty, battlefield smell of the butcher shop below.

I moved the book from my bedside to the desk and back again. I performed a series of tests—not on the book, but on myself: writing out my whereabouts for the last three days to ensure there were no odd gaps, reciting every monarch of Dominion from Yvanne up to the republic, pinching myself quite hard, et cetera. I had suffered some little disturbances after the war—forgetting things that had happened only the day before, or remembering things which had never happened, or confusing dreams for memories—but my mind seemed to be in perfect order now.

I went to bed early and lay tense and unsleeping for several hours.

At two or three in the morning I said, aloud, “God, enough,” slipped on a pair of cotton gloves, and opened the book. I translated the first sentence: It begins where it ends: beneath the yew tree.

A surprising peace moved through me as I wrote the words, an almost mechanical satisfaction, as of a key turning smoothly in a lock. I returned to bed and slept well. I dreamed, and my dreams were all of you.

The second and third days I spent examining the book as an archaeological object, striving for some semblance of objectivity.

It was not at all uncommon for unscrupulous or excitable persons to “discover” artifacts related to Una Everlasting. Every old tree in every old village was the one from which you first pulled Valiance; every rusted

shield was the one you wore on your left arm, a white dragon upon a red field. Just last week Professor Sawbridge had been called away to investigate a vault beneath the ruins of Cavallon Keep, which might have been your final resting place.

I extracted tiny samples of ink and studied the grain of the wood beneath my strongest magnifying glass. I took meticulous, if inconclusive, notes.

Ink is oak gall, hand-lettered—rate of decay indicates early period. Pages are wood pulp. Parchment or vellum would have been more typical.

On the fourth day I opened the book again and worked through the first six pages, and forgot all my fussy, doubtful notes. Yes, the paper was anachronistic. Yes, the binding was unusual, perhaps even unique. But the words themselves rang in my head like church bells, and I came to believe that whoever had written them had truly known you, not only as a hero or a saint, but as a living woman.

It was the way he described you, the casual familiarity of it, and the way he sometimes forgot the grander quest in favor of odd, quiet moments of intimacy. But most of all it was the way he mourned you. Grief rose from every page like turpentine, burning the back of my throat.

On the fifth day I made copies of my translated pages and mailed them to Professor Sawbridge, who was still away supervising the excavation of the burial vault.

On the sixth day Professor Sawbridge and I exchanged a series of telegrams, in which she called me a rude name, committed light treason, and cast aspersions on the veracity of the text. I knew she was at least intrigued, however, because she was taking the early train back to campus, and the only thing she hated more than her country was getting out of bed before ten o’clock.

On the seventh day, I went out for cigarettes and milk. The sun was far too hot and the air was far too fresh, moving around me in great unsettling billows, tugging at my sleeves.

When I returned, with relief, to the stale dark of my flat, the book was gone.

In its place there was a crisp white card, bearing no name, but only an address.

I had never flourished in a crisis. I was one of God’s natural ditherers, much given to the wringing of hands and the writing of unhelpful lists. Since the war, I had added fits of weeping and melancholic stupors, and every now and then a wave of confused and violent memory that left me curled in a corner, shaking.

I did not dither now, though, nor wring my hands. I did compose a brief and unhelpful list (1. Report the theft of a nonexistent book to the police; 2.

Search the room for clues, as they are always doing in novels; 3. Weeping fit??), but I did not even bother to write it down. My body was already moving, as if it had decided on a course of action without me.

I donned my old red service coat, then—after a moment’s sweaty uncertainty—removed the coat, strapped my holstered Sinclair service revolver over my shoulder, and slipped the coat back over it. I tucked two packs of cigarettes into the breast pocket and left the flat with the white card clutched so tightly in my hand that the edges cut into my palm.

I showed the card to the cab driver, who read the address twice, gave me a suspicious, flinty look, then drove in silence to the very heart of Cavallon and deposited me on the steps of a building I’d never seen, but recognized nonetheless, because it was stamped on the back of every coin in the country: the capitol.

I exited the cab clumsily, blinded by the sheer volume of white marble.

The air was thick and hot, as if it had been panted from a dog’s mouth; I couldn’t imagine, suddenly, why I’d worn my service jacket.

“Traitors, the lot of you.” It was my driver, leaning one elbow out the window and enunciating very clearly, as if he’d been rehearsing during the drive.

I was not surprised by this statement. The war was over, but the occupation was proving messy and expensive, and there were plenty of people who were thrilled to find someone with brown eyes to blame for it. I also happened to be, by literal and legal definition, a traitor.

But then I saw the crowd gathered at the steps of the capitol, signs and banners waving, and felt a surge of embarrassment instead.

“Oh, no—I’m not with—” But the driver had already slipped back into traffic.

I turned quickly away from the crowd, hunching my shoulders. I comforted myself that treasonous chanting was probably quite diverting, and there was no reason any of them should notice a panicky scholar lurking nearby. And anyway, they might not even be affiliated with my father. Those radical organizations were always dividing and sub-dividing, as if their true purpose was not the downfall of tyranny but the invention of

new acronyms.

“Owen? That you?”

I flinched, feeling like a boy caught sneaking out of the house, except that my father had never much cared where I went or when I came back.

I turned, sweating hard, and saw him limping gamely through the crowd, one arm raised.

“Well, if it isn’t my favorite propagandist,” my father said, and smiled at me.

It was such a good smile—sincere but a little roguish, the bags beneath his eyes folding up like merry accordions, as if our last fight had never happened or wasn’t worth remembering—that I muttered, “Hello, Dad.”

And then, more stiffly, “What’s all this?”

“Ah,” he scoffed, “some friends of mine. Just a little gathering.”

“A gathering with slogans is called a protest, Dad.”

The smile faded. Without it, my father looked more like what he was: old and tired and hungover, probably in a great deal of pain. He’d always been thin, but now he resembled the scraps one might save for a stray, all

bone and gristle.

“That bloodthirsty tyrant—”

“Her title is Minister Rolfe, and as our first female Minister of War I think she deserves a certain degree of respect—”

“Oh-ho, does she show respect for the women who’ve died in her munitions factories—which she refuses to investigate, because they’re owned by her nasty industrialist friends?” I often imagined my father would have made a good solicitor, if he hadn’t taken up anarchy instead. “The union girls invited her to speak at one of their meetings and do you know

what she called them? Poison!” My father shook his head. “She wants to be Chancellor, if you ask me. Thinks we’ll all just go quietly along with it.”

He added a scornful ha!, but the truth was that I’d spent the last several years going quietly along with it. It wasn’t hard; I simply never read the papers or listened to the wireless or voted. I declined every invitation to veterans clubs and kept my Medal of Valor in my loose change jar. If it wasn’t for the dreams and the shaking fits, I might have been able to pretend I’d had my throat slit in a terrible archival accident.

My father was still talking. “But I can tell you our pamphlet circulation is up two hundred percent! Not everyone wants to see their tax dollars support an illegal occupation. Not everyone was happy to waste their sons on a ridiculous war—”

“Some of us shed a lot of blood for that ridiculous war,” I interrupted, in that especially priggish tone I seemed to reserve solely for my father.

“Some of us fought for crown and country—”

“A country with colonies is called an empire, son.”

We regarded one another unhappily for a little while. The chanting continued shamelessly on. The sun shone heartlessly down. I was very conscious of the strap of the holster beneath my coat, and the sheer insanity of bringing a weapon to the capitol of Dominion.

Eventually, my father offered, with gruff resignation, “There’s extra signs, if you’d care to join us.” Behind him two men were unrolling a long banner that read: VETERANS AGAINST WAR!

“I thought you were the Veterans for Peace.”

“Don’t you mention the VFP in my presence. Class traitors and sycophants, all of them.” My father softened, leaning close. His breath rose in fumes between us. “What do you say, son?”

I looked at him, with his pinkish-white complexion and his hair the color of underbaked bread, and marveled that he had never truly noticed the difference between us. He didn’t seem to understand that a man like me would never be wholly beyond suspicion, no matter how ardently loyal, while a man like him would never be wholly condemned, no matter how faithless. That I had always hated him, just a little, for the privilege of his deviance.

I answered, in my coldest Cantford drawl, “No, thank you.”

My father would have said something else—I had never in my life gotten the last word—but someone touched my right elbow and said, “This way, sir,” with the professional unobtrusiveness that I associated with spies or very good waiters.

“Excuse me,” I said to my father, and turned away with profound relief.

His voice followed us into the building, asking why I wasn’t angry and how I slept at night, and finally, plaintively, as we approached a nondescript door, “And why the hell are you wearing that coat? It’s hot as the devil out.”

The spy/waiter led me through the door, where I was handed off to an even more unobtrusive person, who took me through a series of hallways that ended in another door, which was attended by someone so masterfully unobtrusive they seemed to blend into the plaster.

They turned the knob and announced, deferentially, “Corporal Owen Mallory, ma’am.”

I had a fleeting impression of wealth—velvet drapes, waxed parquet— before my eyes landed on a heavy desk and, sitting behind it, a woman.

I’d never seen her before in my life, but I had the brief, disorienting sense that I knew her. I knew the sleek brass of her hair, styled so perfectly it might have been strapped on, like a helmet. I knew the clear blue of her eyes and I knew—I knew—that voice: “Thank you for coming, Corporal Mallory.”

It was the thank you that did it. Suddenly I was back in the field hospital after the dunes, listening to that voice thank me for my sacrifice to crown and country.

I froze two steps across the parquet, contorting into a panicked gesture somewhere between a salute and a bow. “Oh my God, ma’am—Minister Rolfe—”

A low laugh, which managed not to be mocking. “Call me Vivian. Sit down.”

I settled myself, carefully not imagining what my father would say if he knew his son was on first-name terms with Vivian Rolfe.

She regarded me across the polished expanse of her desk. She was always perfectly composed in her speeches and appearances, no matter what the opposition said or did.

But now she looked a little harried. Two of her nails had been badly chewed, and the starch had gone out of her collar, so that it lay limp against her collarbones.

She set a slim cigarette between her lips and leaned minutely forward.

An awkward beat passed before I fumbled the matchbook from my coat pocket and cupped a flame between us. The light settled in the hollows of her face, finding the skull beneath her skin. I couldn’t tell how old she was.

She exhaled a long white plume and said, pensively, “You’d think it would have been enough. There were losses, to be sure, but we won. Our oldest enemy, thrown down! If I were a man, he’d be crowning me by

now.”

“Ma’am?” I offered, intelligently.

She cut me a wry, pitying look. “Chancellor Gladwell has asked for my resignation. I made that boy—does he think he would have been reelected without a war?—but now they’re whining about the budget and the cost of reconstruction, and they’ve found just the woman to blame.”

“Oh,” I said. In the silence, the faint sound of chanting could be heard from the window.

Vivian rubbed her temples. “And those bastards simply refuse to shut up.” I tried not to blink, because I’d read somewhere that blinking was a sign of guilt. She added, wistfully, “I’d have them rounded up like cattle, if I could.”

The dispassion in her voice sent a chill over my scalp. My father had so far suffered no worse than a ritualistic series of arrests and fines, but suddenly I could imagine his body splayed on the capitol steps, the butt of a rifle raised above him. I made a mental note to remind him to start using a more difficult cipher for his letters and pamphlets.

Vivian tapped her cigarette twice on the lip of an ashtray. “But nothing is ever handed to us, is it, Corporal Mallory? This country may not believe in me anymore”—a self-deprecating laugh, only slightly bitter—“but I’ll be damned if I stop believing in it.”

“Ma’am?” I said again.

Vivian rolled her neck from side to side, and when she looked at me again a subtle transformation had taken place. Her spine had stiffened and her shoulders moved back, so that the points of her jacket drew a perfect line in the air. All the irony and weariness had leached from her face and left behind a quiet, earnest zeal. She looked both younger and much older.

When she spoke again, it was in the flowing, modulated voice I heard on the radio. “Our country is at a crossroads. Finally, after centuries of strife, we stand as Yvanne imagined us: a nation united, at peace. But peace is a fragile, fleeting thing. It must be protected, fought for, defended against all threats, native and foreign alike—and I fear we have grown weak.”

I felt I ought to nod, so I did.

“I don’t refer only to the obvious dissidents—at least they care, in their misguided way, about the future of the nation. It’s the disinterested, the doubtful. It’s the empty pews in our churches and the apathy in our schools.

The young people who don’t know where we came from or what we fought for. We’ve forgotten—as a nation, as a people—who we are.”

All of these were lines from her speeches, which left me with the sweaty, trapped feeling that I was the only person in the audience of a one- woman play. I wished, passionately, that I’d taken off my coat.

But then Vivian pulled something heavy from a drawer and set in on the desk between us with the muted clack of wood on wood, and I forgot about my coat.

A book. The book. I leaned toward it, pulled by whatever secret gravity had sent it to me in the first place.

“I read your article about the grail. Brilliant work.” (When Professor Sawbridge had read that article, she’d sighed for a long time and said: You may be a patriot or a historian, Mallory, but not both.) “You argued that a nation is not a boundary on a map or a flag on a pole, but only a story we

tell about ourselves.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“It’s a hell of a story, isn’t it?” One of Vivian’s fingers, long and delicate, touched the cover. It was not a reverent or thrilled touch, but the casual, possessive gesture of a reader to her favorite book. “Honor.

Courage. Tragedy. The villains cast down, the hero triumphant, the rightful queen restored. And yet, it fades. The people forget. It’s time we remind them.”

She traced the circle of the device on the cover and then, abruptly, slid the book several inches toward me. “You have served your country well, Owen Mallory.” She met my eyes and her voice fell nearly to a whisper.

“Are you the man who will save it?”

Some latent desire in me—to kneel, to surrender myself to some grander purpose—to erase the ignominy of my origins and earn my place at last in the grand tradition of Dominion—unfurled inside me. Vivian Rolfe looked at me so steadily and for so long that I felt the light contract around us, so that I imagined the shadow of a crown on her brow, felt the phantom weight of a blade on my shoulders.

I nodded, because I had an awful certainty that if I spoke my voice would be choked with tears.

“I knew you were.” The warmth in her voice, the absolute certainty—as if she was not at all surprised by my answer—sent a flush of pleasure through me.

“It was you, wasn’t it?” I sounded boyish, overeager. “Who discovered the book.”

She dipped her head in grave approval. “We’ve been excavating the ruins of Cavallon Keep for years now. A few weeks ago, we found a vault, and in the vault was a locked chest, and inside the chest … Well.” I hoped the archaeologist had gotten to say By Jove at least once. Vivian continued, “Can you imagine? People have been searching for centuries, scouring every crypt and castle, and only now—in Dominion’s darkest hour!—does it reveal itself. It’s providence. Fate. The hand of the Savior Himself, I

sometimes think.”

“And then you … mailed it to me?”

Her expression turned indulgent. “Forgive my little test. If you had gone to the press, or tried to sell it—but you didn’t. You kept it secret, treasured it, labored over it. That’s how I knew you were the right man to tell Una’s story.”

A new and delicious sense of my own significance filled me. I’d never been picked first for anything in my life, and now the Minister of War—or at least, the former Minister of War—had chosen me to translate the greatest historical artifact in Dominion’s history. Visions of honorary degrees and book tours danced in my head; becoming the Middle Dominion Faculty Fellow; Harrison combusting from pure envy; my father clapping me on the back and saying, You’ve changed my mind about everything, I’m so sorry for my decades of embarrassing radicalism.

“I—I’ll try, ma’am.”

“Excellent! Go ahead then, no time like the present. Get in touch when you finish your translation.” Vivian ground her cigarette into the tray and reached for a letter opener, as if our conversation was over.

I stood clumsily, dizzy with awe. “Yes, ma’am.” My hands shook as badly as they had in the war, as if they were approaching a battlefield instead of a book.

The cover was cool and smooth as stone. I felt Vivian’s eyes on me again, perhaps wondering why I lingered. But a strange anxiety gripped me, a sense that some trick was being pulled. I opened the book carefully, praying the college archivist never found out.

And then I went very still. I wet my lips twice before I could speak.

“The pages.” I cringed from the hoarse whistle of my voice. “The pages are —”

“Blank? Yes.” Vivian spoke lightly, with humor, twirling the letter opener in her fingers. The point glinted.

I had the sudden, inexplicable urge to hit her. For a moment I saw it so clearly in my mind—saw my knuckles splitting against her perfect white canine, blood overfilling her mouth and sheeting down her chin—that I recoiled from myself.

“Why,” I asked, swallowing, “are they blank?”

She leaned over the desk, smiling peacefully. Beneath the tang of cigarette smoke, I smelled something sweet and a little familiar, like summer flowers. “Because you haven’t written them yet,” she said, and then she stabbed the letter opener through the back of my left hand.

I did not scream. My vocal cords were too knotted and scarred to produce anything louder than an eerie, breathy howl, like the keen of a dog.

I tugged dumbly at my hand, but the letter opener had sunk into the pages below, pinning it there.

Vivian leaned closer. Her expression was still peaceful, perhaps even sympathetic. “Your country needs you, Corporal.”

I watched with a sense of unreality as my blood spread over the empty paper like a red map, an empire in bloom. I looked quickly away, but something had gone wrong with my vision.

Everything in the room felt translucent, impermanent, as if the paint of the world was fading and peeling away in great strips.

I closed my eyes. I smelled pine and snow, now, instead of flowers.

Vivian’s voice came to me from very far away, softly urgent. “She needs you, Owen.”

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