Hearts of Oak

by Eddie Robson

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  For Catherine, Gabriel, and Jago

  1

  THE KING GLANCED ACROSS his chambers and saw his morning letter had arrived. He picked it up from the floor and was surprised by its weight. He turned it over in his hands. “It’s a thick one today,” the king said to his cat.

  “I know,” agreed his cat, who was large and ginger and called Clarence. Clarence always delivered the morning letter to the king’s chambers, carrying it in his mouth, and so he was bound to notice when it was thicker than usual.

  “What’s happened to make it this thick?” asked the king, squeezing the letter between his thumb and forefinger.

  “Open it and we might find out,” said Clarence impatiently.

  The king opened the envelope and pulled out the wad of paper that had been folded into thirds. He skimmed the summary on the uppermost page. “Oh right,” he said. “All the funerals for the victims of the building site collapse are being held today.” This meant the letter would be full of tributes from their friends and colleagues. And one of the victims, a man called Weston, had been a teacher for a long time. People always remembered their old teachers and they often sent tributes. The king counted the dead listed on the summary. “Wow. Nine funerals.”

  “A terrible disaster, Your Highness,” said Clarence, shaking his head.

  The king sat in his chair by the window, turned to the first page, and started reading.

  Clarence sat on the small table by the king’s chair. After the king finished reading each page he placed it facing upward on the table so Clarence could read it. But Clarence was visibly disinterested and somewhere around the seventh page he became impatient. “Can’t we skip ahead?”

  “No.”

  “I need to read the construction report.”

  This was sometimes a bone of contention between them. The king was always keen to read about the lives of his citizens but had no interest in the dry details of construction reports—as long as building was progressing he didn’t feel the need to know about it. Clarence was the other way around. But the king firmly believed he was right about this and Clarence was wrong—if the construction report was more interesting than the tributes they wouldn’t put it at the back.

  “No,” said the king. “I want to read these first. You’ve got to have respect for the dead.”

  “I do have respect for the dead but the sooner I read the report, the sooner I can get on with—”

  “Alright,” said the king, peeling off pages from the back of the letter until he reached the first page of the report. He slapped these pages down on the table in front of Clarence. “Happy now?”

  Clarence purred.

  * * *

  The young woman waiting in Iona’s office looked deeply unusual although Iona couldn’t pin down exactly what it was about her. She was smallish and sharp-featured, and she was mostly dressed in shades of gray. Her blond hair fell in ringlets from under a red hat. Her clothes were odd—they didn’t look like they were made of hemp, which led Iona to wonder what exactly they were made of. She was young enough to make Iona feel very old.

  The young woman stood up and took off her hat as Iona entered and Iona told her to sit back down again. Iona walked around behind her desk and lowered herself unsteadily into her own chair. Then she leaned back and asked the young woman her name.

  “Alyssa,” she replied.

  Iona welcomed her and asked why she had come.

  Alyssa leaned an elbow on the chair’s armrest and leaned her head on her fist. The young woman wore a bracelet with a series of small unfamiliar objects attached to it, which jangled distractingly. “I’d like some tuition.”

  “My classes are open to everyone.”

  Alyssa smiled awkwardly. “I was hoping you could give me some one-to-one sessions? I work in planning, you see, and the classes don’t give us much grounding in the practical side—they only really talk about zoning space. I don’t have time for the full course but I’d like a sort of idiot’s guide.”

  “I’ve never done anything like that before.”

  Alyssa raised her eyebrows hopefully. “Does that mean you couldn’t do anything like it now?”

  Iona thought for a moment. She had learned to accept clashes with the planning department as par for the course: they didn’t fully understand how her job worked and didn’t try to. Iona had learned to anticipate their foibles and work around them. It seemed churlish to turn away someone who wanted to know more. “I suppose I could do it. But there are lots of other people you could ask.”

  “But you’re the best. Everyone learned everything they know from you.”

  Iona laughed. “Who told you that?”

  Alyssa shrugged. “Everyone.”

  It was true that Iona was the leading architect in the city and had been for a very long time. But times had changed, the city was bigger, its needs were bigger. They still kept her on at the school and she still designed as many buildings as she ever did, but the work had to be shared between more people these days and there were now many others just as skilled as she was. She sometimes vaguely floated the idea of retiring but it was always laughed off. She’d be here until she dropped. Which was fine by her, she’d be ever so bored at home.

  Her mind had wandered and she remembered Alyssa was still waiting for an answer. She supposed there was no reason not to do something just because it wasn’t how things were usually done.

  They made plans to meet here again tomorrow and then Alyssa left.

  Alone in her office, Iona drifted off into wondering how she would structure their sessions and it took her a few minutes to notice Alyssa had left her hat behind on the desk. The young woman had probably left the building by now, so Iona decided to just hold onto it and give it back tomorrow. She picked it up.

  The texture of the hat triggered something in her. As she felt it she heard the word felt in her mind, but she knew it didn’t mean felt in the sense of feel, it was . . . what the hat was made of. Iona didn’t know how she knew that. It was a dream-word. Iona saw lots of things in her dreams that didn’t exist in the world and she knew the words for them, but she never spoke them aloud because nobody else would know what she was talking about.

  She had never before wanted to apply a dream-word to something in the real world, but here it was. The hat was made of felt. It seemed a stupid word and yet she knew it was right.

  But there was more. A scatter of tiny, fragmentary thoughts was thrown up by the word, as if something had been tossed into the attic of her mind and disturbed the dust. Flashes of people, places, things that didn’t exist but that somehow meant a lot to her anyway, and came at her too quickly to hold onto—

  The door of her office opened again and Alyssa entered. She stopped short and looked at Iona curiously.

  Iona realized she was sitting behind her desk, holding Alyssa’s hat and weeping.

  “Sorry,” said Alyssa, pointing. “I forgot my—”

  “Yes,” said Iona, blinking and handing over the hat. “Sorry, I lost a colleague recently. It’s his funeral this afternoon.�
� This was true, though it was not the reason for her tears.

  “Oh, I see. I’m very sorry.” Alyssa seemed to accept this as an explanation and left.

  * * *

  Iona had plenty of time before the funeral so she decided to walk rather than take a rickshaw. As she left the school and walked down the main thoroughfare, King’s Tower loomed up ahead of her. It currently had scaffolding all up one side. When Iona had designed it—so long ago now she could hardly remember—it had been a sleek needle shooting from the center of the city and up above the skyline. These days it was swollen by extensions and additions, mostly designed by Iona herself and all to the detriment of the building, in her opinion, though she’d done her best with them.

  The planning department, which had long stood in the shadow of the tower, had been scheduled for demolition just as soon as work on the new, larger planning department was completed. In place of the old planning department a new buttress would be built to support the tower on its heavier side. Six more floors had recently been added at the top of the tower, bringing the total to thirty-one, and the king’s apartment had been moved so it was once again on the top floor. But before they could build any further extensions they needed to reinforce that side—Iona had been clear on this even though the planning department would have happily signed off a ten-story extension if she’d let them.

  Iona was all in favor of tearing the thing down and starting again but she knew planning would never agree to that. King’s Tower was sacrosanct.

  Iona took a detour past the building site for the new planning department because she wanted to see how it was going. At twelve stories high it was larger than it needed to be, but then that was true of everything these days. Her own house was a prime example. From time to time they would tell her she deserved a bigger one for all her good work; she would tell them she didn’t need a bigger one, and was happy with what she had; they would assume she was just being polite, and insist she accept; and she would accept. She rarely went into the upper stories of her current house and when she did it struck her how they still smelled new.

  A member of the construction team recognized Iona from a long way off and as she arrived at the edge of the site several of them came over to meet her. She recognized many former students. They surrounded her, their voices tumbling and clattering against each other as they eagerly greeted their old teacher. They asked how she was (she said fine), what the school was like these days (she said it was much the same), if she was going to retire soon (she said they wouldn’t let her). In return she complimented them on their excellent workmanship, to which they modestly replied they were just doing things the way she’d taught them. They offered to show her around the site but she told them she couldn’t stop, she was on her way to the funeral.

  The atmosphere turned somber.

  “We wanted to go, we couldn’t get the time off,” said one of her former students, whose name was Bridge. They asked Iona to pass on their condolences and drifted back inside.

  * * *

  The funeral took place at the city’s largest and newest Point of Return. It had been built as a single unit but designed as two units fused together, so it looked like the two sections had been built at different times but it was impossible to tell which came first. This effect was deliberate. As she arrived Iona remembered with a jolt that she and Weston had collaborated on the design.

  The memorial parlor at the front was an attractive, old-fashioned building with a high ceiling, a sharply sloping roof, and a steeple at the front with a sundial on it. The restricted area beyond was larger, a featureless semi-cylinder with narrow windows at regular intervals. It was the third Point that had been built since the city’s foundation, meeting the demands of a greater population, and no doubt one day the call would come for a fourth, larger still. Iona pondered how she would improve on this one when that day came. You could always improve. There were always needs you couldn’t anticipate, you could only watch and see how a building functioned on a day-to-day basis.

  Entering the memorial parlor, Iona saw the turnout was good. All Weston’s colleagues had come, and as the school was closed for the afternoon, many of the students had come too. The people Iona didn’t recognize were, presumably, Weston’s friends and neighbors. Rather than walking down the central aisle, Iona went down one side and made her way to the front, where a space had been reserved for her.

  The last few mourners filed in, the doors closed, the room went quiet, and the undertaker took up her position at the front. Weston’s plain coffin stood open on a table behind her.

  “Weston,” said the undertaker. “Architect. Teacher.” She then gestured to Iona, which was her cue to rise and take the undertaker’s place.

  Iona looked out across the rows of faces, all angled expectantly toward her. She turned to the coffin and peered in at the body of her deceased colleague. Weston’s inanimate form looked as if he might just be resting. The surest sign that he was actually dead was the perfect symmetry with which his body had been laid out. The precision was traditional and unmistakable. Iona reached across and placed her hand on Weston’s. It was cold and smooth to the touch.

  Iona turned back to the crowd and spoke. “In all my years of teaching, I have had the pleasure of working alongside many brilliant and inspiring people. But few were as creative in their thinking, or as clear in their communication as Weston. He was utterly dedicated to his students. I remember once finding him asleep in the corner of the staff room. The planning department had returned one of his designs with what they thought was a minor change, but actually meant completely restructuring the ground floor—and the plans needed to be revised and submitted to the king in two days. Instead of getting someone else to cover his seminar on load-bearing experiments, Weston skipped two downtimes so he could do both because he didn’t want to let the students down. I couldn’t rouse him, I had to pull him home myself in a rickshaw.”

  Some laughter at that image.

  “The school is poorer for his loss. So is the city. His contribution, in terms of design and knowledge, was immense. He will not be easily replaced, but he will be easily remembered.”

  She mentioned nothing about how he’d died. People didn’t want to dwell on that.

  As Iona returned to her seat, returning appreciative glances with a nod, she wondered whether she had said those words before to someone else’s mourners. She had spoken at a huge number of funerals—she was always asked to, if she’d known the deceased—and what she’d just said had a familiar ring to it. Even the anecdote, which the more she thought about it may well have been about a different colleague. She worried that someone in the audience might remember her saying it and find this disrespectful.

  But whether she had said those things before or not, she still meant them. And surely nobody was comparing this eulogy with her previous ones and checking for repetition. Those words she’d just spoken would go in no book, they had lived in the air for a moment and now they died just like the man they’d commemorated. The content of them was less important than the feeling they left behind.

  A couple more people took to the stage to say a few words, then the undertaker returned, closed the coffin, and with the help of an assistant turned it 90 degrees, so Weston’s feet now pointed toward the furnace door at the back of the hall. Then the xylophonist at the side of the stage started to play a ceremonial tune that echoed through the hall as the furnace door slid open, revealing the flames beyond.

  (The sight of the furnace never failed to raise a flinch from some of those watching.)

  The undertaker and her assistant pushed the coffin onto the conveyor that led to the furnace, then they both stood back and let the slow turn of its rollers draw the coffin along. This was always a moment of contemplation, this final journey to the flames. For some the reality of the loss of their friend would just be hitting home, while others would be anticipating a moment of catharsis, the circle of a life completed. The amount of energy gained by burning the body was
minimal, of course—a fraction of what the city required to run for even an hour—but the symbolic value of the gesture was powerful.

  However, someone seated at the back of the parlor had something else on his mind. Iona didn’t hear him at first—rather, she heard other people turning to look at him and she turned too. The man was standing up and making his way along the pew toward the aisle. He wasn’t anyone Iona recognized, he certainly wasn’t from the school. When he reached the aisle he started to walk toward the front, then he started to run. Disquiet spread through the parlor but nobody tried to stop him or even spoke up. Nobody had the slightest idea what he was doing so nobody knew what to do about it.

  The man reached the front, leaped up onto the stage, and headed straight for the conveyor. The xylophonist dropped his beaters in surprise. The undertaker and her assistant moved to intercept the interloper but they were unprepared and he was stronger than them. He nudged them aside easily and climbed onto the conveyor. The coffin had still not quite entered the furnace. The man dashed along the rollers, leaped onto the coffin—

  And the man and the coffin disappeared into the furnace together. The door closed behind them.

  The mourners stared at the stage. There was silence. The undertaker and her assistant stared at each other.

  Haltingly the xylophonist started to play again.

  * * *

  The crowds leaving the Point of Return filled the streets, mingling with other citizens, and Iona could hear whispers about what had happened in there. Nobody could explain it. Had the man been suicidal? If so, why choose that time and place and that manner? Did he have some connection with Weston and was unable to accept life without him? Or had he been trying to open the coffin in those final moments, release the body? Some colleagues asked Iona what she’d seen, but she told them from where she’d been sitting she couldn’t tell what he’d been trying to do. It had all happened too quickly.

  The crowds drifted away from each other and Iona walked back toward her house, which was a very short distance from the school. As she turned into her street she glanced into the window of one of her neighbors. She could see two people sitting on either side of a table, their attention focused on each other, engrossed in conversation. This was a very common sight across the city, it was how most people spent their spare time, and Iona knew she wasn’t meant to look—it was a private thing. She wondered, not for the first time, why nobody had ever invited her to do it with them. She never asked anyone—it didn’t seem right to. Maybe she should have asked Weston. If there was anyone she could have asked it was him.