The Queen of the Night

by Alexander Chee

  The city has gone mad, he said. When you kill the women, you are murdering even the future.

  I was quiet as he worked.

  I could as easily die in the balloon, I said.

  But you might live, he said, against my face, suddenly, and he kissed me through my hood.

  He threw me into the basket then, reached in, and removed the hood. As I struggled to my feet, shouting, he threw the ropes in with me.

  The balloon lurched into the air and then stayed a moment. He held the last rope and a knife.

  I do this for love of you, he said.

  The city had darkened around us, strung with lights again in places—the fabric of the night still broken by fire. Above me, the balloon, glowing in the horrible light of the flame filling it.

  It was small, but I knew it would be enough for me. It glowed like something brought up from hell.

  He reached in and cut the ties at my wrists quickly, and as I reached for him, he let go.

  No, he said.

  I fell into the basket as the balloon shot into the air. I struggled to get to my feet again and then stood, grabbing the straps and steadying myself as I remembered.

  He stood looking at me, and then I saw a dark figure moving quickly behind him and I screamed, but I was not fast enough. He fell to his knees, gasping, arching his back forward.

  The killer’s face turned quickly to the balloon, and I saw Eugène had waited all this time.

  His knife hand rose and came down again.

  I screamed with all of my might this time, and the balloon shook as if from it, already at a terrifying height, the basket tossing in the winds as it rose, pulling me into the sky. I screamed for Eugène to stop, though I had gone too high for him to hear.

  When I woke some weeks later in a hospital in Metz, the nurse asked me who Eugène was.

  Nine

  I CAN’T TELL YOU how astonished I am, the Prince said, that you’re alive. Twice over now.

  The Prince’s family is one of the country’s oldest, the tenor had told me as he brought me to this audience by train. They are nearly sacred in Germany. They are one of our sacred families.

  My balloon had crashed to earth in Metz. I survived the impact but the straps around my arms broke my arms when I landed. It is traditional to punish mortals who fly with worse than this, the nurse said. You are lucky.

  I had spent weeks in the field hospital until I was well enough to be moved. At some point, in and out of my morphine sleep, I knew the tenor had appeared before me. His face red, wet, his coat still on.

  Ah, thank God! he shouted, and I turned my face away.

  His letter and handkerchief were still in my pocket. The nurses had contacted him at once.

  I had not tied his signal to the ropes. I had hoped for certain death.

  In my dreams during the week after my escape, I dreamt I was in flight, dressed in the Amazon of the Seine uniform, stepping off the balloon into the cool embrace of the night wind, lifting up into the air and lighting my way by the cold radiance of my moon-white face as I fled into the farthest reaches of the sky. Below me, Paris burned. And then I woke each time to find myself in Germany. Where I truly was.

  No dream, this.

  The tenor had insisted he bring me to meet a man he called the Prince, who wanted to thank me. But now in his throne room, I saw he had already introduced us.

  In front of me was his young officer friend, the one who wanted to be a composer. I remembered him as the one who liked to bring his compositions to the apartment and sit at the piano while I did my best to sing them through. He had told me he was a composer forced to be a soldier; from his compositions, I had never been sure if he was to be a composer, but to see him here suggested he was the better as a soldier.

  If il trovatore is an agent of his king, this was his king. Here was my secret god, surely, the one who ruled over us all, hidden from view until now. Which meant the audience, in which he would explain all he had done, was next.

  I was here finally. I had made it past the veil.

  I sat before him in a wheelchair, all of me covered in a wolf cloak, my arms splinted over the dressing gown I’d worn for the trip—an invalid was allowed such things—but the cloak was meant to make me presentable for this initial greeting. The doctors who received me protested to the tenor that I needed rest, but I was brought all the same into the royal chamber to greet my host.

  We were in a massive and ancient castle overlooking the Rhine from atop a sheer rock cliff—the same color as the rock it sat on, the castle looked to have grown there. Every surface inside seemed intricately wrought with carvings, and the walls encrusted by tapestries, paintings, taxidermy—snarling wolves, elegant deer, birds of kinds I’d never seen before; and along the elegantly arched walls, a forest of mounted horns and antlers rose to incredible heights.

  They, too, seemed born out of the rock, all of it of a piece. I couldn’t imagine moving a single item from its place.

  The Prince was addressing me from a modest throne of ancient carved wood nearly black in color. He spoke in the excellent French I remembered from when I first knew him; back then, he’d intimidated me into a sort of watchful silence, not so different from the one I kept here before him. The effect was uncanny. He was fair, upright, small for a German, with a thin, delicate nose and beautiful bowed lips beneath his full moustache. His small bright eyes shone with real happiness when he saw me. And yet this seemed like a mask, as if it could fall away. He wore his dress uniform decorated with a sash of a beautiful pale blue, as if to tell me a military operation had concluded or was still under way. I remembered him in more of a Paris poet’s attire, simple suits, a more bohemian, relaxed appearance; but even his beard and moustache were carefully waxed in place and his hair pomaded close. Though he had never really seemed to me to be a struggling composer, he appeared as out of place here as he had before in my Paris bedroom. Neither affect seemed like a disguise. Instead, it was as if he had a twin appearing before me now as a conqueror.

  Perhaps he belonged nowhere. Perhaps he was like me.

  I offered my hand, and he bowed as he took it, pressing a faint, warm kiss that surprised me.

  You are surprised to see me again. Your surprise speaks well of our mutual friend’s discretion. Please, have some tea.

  I was unable to hold a teacup, and so I looked first to the cup and then to my shoulders. He motioned to one of my new maids, who came and held the cup up to my lips. I took a drink.

  First we thought you were dead, then we were sure you could not survive. Perhaps you are not a woman at all, he said.

  This was the sort of remark I knew he thought was gracious. In my wheelchair, I shivered.

  He said something quickly to one of the butlers observing from the side, and a fox cape was brought out and settled around my shoulders over the wolf.

  It may be you cannot die, he said, but there’s no reason to let you get a chill.

  He sat back.

  We have always been a correction to France, he said. We routed the first Napoléon at the Battle of Leipzig. We have routed the second one now as well. I think any time a Napoléon grows to power, we will be ready to mark the place past which he cannot pass. It’s a pity about Eugénie, however. Did you love her, your mistress? he asked.

  I did, I said.

  I did also, he said. She should never have been an empress, but she was wonderful all the same. Please be welcome here, you are an honored guest. Whatever you need, please ask, it will be made available. We will spare no expense to nurse you back to health, and I hope you’ll be well enough to join us even briefly for the celebration this weekend.

  The maid held my teacup back to my mouth, and I drank again. And as I did, I watched as, behind the Prince, the sight of that monstrous fountain of death in the Luxembourg Gardens returned. The bodies in their awful disarray, the pale stone stained red and black, as if the bodies had come out of some terrible well of death in the ground.

  I said nothing; t
hey could not see it. They would never see it. They would never see it, and I was sure I always would.

  I focused instead on the smiling visage of the Prince, who seemed so strangely kind, though all of his proffered hospitality had a hidden distaste in it. Distaste or something worse.

  He was looking at me with a studied interest, as he would at a hurting dog. He still needed me alive.

  The muscles in my arms groaned as they pulled across the broken bones, anxious to clench my fists. My stupid heart, it kept beating; I could feel it against my chest as I was wheeled from the room.

  §

  Afterward, I was shown to my apartments, where I found trunks waiting for me. As the maids unpacked them, I shooed them away and sat in the corner under my new cape until the tenor came for me.

  You haven’t even dressed, he said. Come, be quick. We cannot be late to dinner.

  I only looked at him, empty of anything to say.

  What’s wrong?

  I shivered, not from the cold this time, but from fury.

  My dear, I went to a great trouble for these. These are from Paris. From your dressmaker. He reached in and removed a dinner gown, unfolding it slowly. It was in the colors of the court, blue and white.

  He snapped his fingers and maids appeared from outside the doorway.

  Dress, and at dinner you will hear plans for the coming victory celebration. It is my hope you will be well enough to sing for our host then, for it will be partly in your honor.

  My honor.

  I waited for even the slightest recognition from him at what he’d done, but he avoided my eyes and was not looking at me even as he said this, looking to my side instead. As he bowed and left, walking past me to the door, I wanted to rage at him, to leap from this chair, grab the sword at his side, and stab him through.

  All those nights while you slept, I should have killed you, I said to his back. I wish I had. Even if it would have meant my life, at least I would have died before losing him.

  He stopped short.

  I would have died before I met him, before I could have lost any of this.

  I could see him in the mirror before me, his back still to me. He went to leave again and then paused.

  I saved you, he said. You should have killed me? You owe me everything. I saved you, you belong to me, you belong here with me. Someday you’ll see why, and you’ll forgive me. And I, I will wait for that day. But remember: Anything you ever lost to me you had from me. Don’t forget this.

  And with this, he turned the corner and was gone.

  The maids brought me to the mirror to prepare, the one letting my hair down and beginning to brush it. My broken arms were setting still, and I could feel them at times, the bones reaching for one another across the break.

  I shouted the maids away and took to the bed, where I stayed for days. When the tenor came to my door, I refused to respond to him. I refused the food and the water as well, taking only a little water when the maids held me down and the tenor poured it into my throat.

  They began to tie me to the bed, forcing me to drink cool broth as well.

  Has she gone mad then? I heard the Prince ask from the hall before one such session.

  She is not mad, the tenor said. She is only stubborn. He sat down on the bed once my arms and feet had been bound to the posts. He reached to stroke my forehead and then pressed my hair back tenderly.

  A new life awaits you in this place. You’re a guest of honor. New dresses wait in your trunks from your dressmaker in Paris, also furs, jewels. And an honor awaits you as well, he said. We could as easily bury you with it, but I would prefer to see the Prince pin it to your breast.

  He took my face in his right hand. It was his sword hand, his trigger hand. He had killed with that hand, and I knew it every time he touched me. He met my eyes at last.

  You don’t fool me, he said. You can’t make me kill you. You don’t want to die, not like this.

  I wondered if I did.

  That black tower of the dead I always saw behind the tenor seemed to change shape then, as if it were a shadow to something much larger, and then it shifted again, rising up until it became a storm—a storm of the dead, the river of dead I had seen that day, howling and shrieking as it wheeled about the room before changing again, suddenly somehow now a black horse and rider circling the room, rearing and turning.

  It was the horse I had found the day of the massacre, surely dead now; this was its ghost—and the rider? I could not see his face, but as he came for me, I knew who I wished he was, and though I could not be sure, I reached for him, screaming as I did so, an inhuman howl that terrified me even as I could not stop making it. I could hear the maids shouting for the guards and feel the pain in my arms as I struck at them with all my strength, and said, Don’t let them keep me here, don’t let them! I begged, not here, not here, again and again, and then I was so very light, I could hear nothing but the hooves as I sat on the horse at last. I was gone into the blackness with my rider, for how long I am still uncertain.

  Ten

  WHEN THE BLACKNESS released me at last, it was early summer.

  I found myself seated in the music room of the castle. My arms had healed such that they were bare of their splints, but my wrists now were bound to the armrests of a sturdy wheelchair. I wore a simple dress of a light gabardine I didn’t recognize and slippers on my feet. My hair, I could feel, was tied up behind my head, tucked into a cap.

  I pushed at my feet to see if I could move them, but found they, too, were bound. Wrists, hair, legs, all bound. What of my mouth? I opened it, licked my lips. That, at least, was free.

  Across the room, three men and a piano beneath some enormous glittering chandelier that blazed blue in the summer light. These men were the tenor and the Prince, who conferred with a young man seated there whom I didn’t recognize, playing scales in preparation for some rehearsal. They were deeply engaged with one another, and did not see me.

  I recalled the Prince considered himself something of a composer. It may even be the memory of his compositions, played to me so long ago, that called me back, or it could just have been as simple as the sound of a piano in the German summer air—and with that, something like the call of my lost paradise in Baden-Baden.

  I watched them for some time, silent. Given my state, it seemed I had most likely tried to escape. I wasn’t yet sure if I wanted them to know my senses had returned. It seemed better to play dumb a little longer. I felt relief knowing that at least, even insensible, I had still clearly tried to escape.

  That I was myself even when I was not myself.

  I knew this music as the rehearsal began. The song was about roses. The Prince had me sing it for him a long time ago. He likely meant for me to sing it again with the two of us as stars in his own private music box.

  She is awake, the tenor said urgently. I knew music would bring her back! And with that, he ran to my side, kissing me and then sinking down to his knees to praise God for my return, kissing my knees, pressing himself into my lap like a boy all while I hated him for knowing how to bring me back.

  §

  The next morning I woke to singing. The tenor was making his way through something unfamiliar to me; he was accompanying himself, too, on the piano, elegantly, and I was struck to think I had never heard him play this way for pleasure.

  I rose, unsteady, and slowly followed the sound down the stairs from my room, waiting outside the music room in the hall, anxious not to disturb him. I was sure if he knew I was listening, he would stop; and to listen now was like listening to a secret.

  How does a monster sing? I wondered.

  When he sang, all his monstrousness vanished. Yet this was sinister, too.

  I looked across and started to see the Prince listening much as I was, leaning against the opposite wall.

  He’s incredible, isn’t he?

  I nodded.

  Do you know this music? It’s the Winterreise. Schubert. He set the poems of the poet Wilhelm Müller to mus
ic. It was one of the last things Schubert wrote music for before he died, and Müller died before it was done. This one is “Die Krähe.” “The Crow.” You don’t speak any German, no? A little? The crow is following the poet, and he is wondering if it is waiting for him to die. He decides he will let the crow wait for him.

  We stood together silently as the song passed around us.

  He is the perfect singer for these—listen carefully and remember, you may never hear a better rendition.

  We listened together, silent as the tenor finished, and then he began another song.

  Our mutual friend will be very sad to lose you, he said.

  I looked at him questioningly.

  It is clear to me you cannot stay, he said, as much as he might like it to be different. You will die here, I think, if you stay. Yes? Or did you decide to let the crow wait for you?

  We paused, listening again. I was careful to neither agree and offend him nor disagree and offend him.

  Where would you be, if you could choose? he asked.

  Paris, I said.

  Even now, he said, and smiled. If you think you are sad here, what would you be in Paris, where they are still cleaning the streets of the dead?

  I closed my eyes then willed them open again. The Prince still smiled.

  Is it still your wish to be a singer? I could make arrangements at any conservatory in Germany. You could go to Leipzig. Or I could return you to Baden-Baden easily if you so liked, he said.

  After another silence, he said, Ah. I understand. Of course, Pauline has left, unlikely to return. You cannot be in Germany at all? Or is it something else? He loves you, you know. Do you not harbor any feelings for him at all?

  I think, perhaps, I can only love him like this, I said. Only here, listening to him sing.

  I turned back to the Prince, who smiled to hear this.

  I can love him even when he is not singing, the Prince said. And so I cannot wound him easily, I think. Not like you, and as he said this, he reached out and brushed the hair at my temple. And while I bear you no natural enmity, over time, despite your charms, I would. He paused. Your charms such as they are for me.