The Book of Kings

by Cynthia Voigt

  As they came closer to the palace, Max saw that it was a long stone building, painted white, and not the shining marble temple it resembled when viewed from the lake below. Flagstone terraces surrounded it, many French doors and tall windows interrupted the flow of its walls, and the whole long building seemed to curve around a wide garden crisscrossed with grassy pathways, bursting with flowery color and all of it just a little untidy, a place where children could go barefoot and take long, looping rides on the swings that hung from the branches of the sturdy old trees, where a scattering of balls and sticks and wooden train sets looked at home on the grass. The party followed Nanny Rose through wide-open French doors into the nursery.

  This was a large, welcoming room, with warm wooden floors and crowded bookshelves, with a fireplace for cool August nights and a long table, low enough for small children to sit at but not so low that a full-grown person couldn’t fit her knees under it. There were maps on the walls, among pictures illustrating some of the old familiar stories—Long John Silver with a parrot on his shoulder, Cinderella running toward her coach, a fox leaping up to secure the grapes that hung just out of reach, and the infant Hercules strangling snakes—the same stories Max had been told or read for himself. Could it be that under their crowns, inside their palaces—as if crowns and palaces were the costumes and settings for a dramatic production—the royal family was made up of real, normal people? A special kind of real, normal people, granted, but all the same, at heart, not so very different from everybody else. It looked that way, at least in this nursery, so maybe it was that way. Max hoped this idea would help him know what to say to the King. He had a letter explaining his request clipped to his sketch pad, and he knew he wouldn’t have time to say much more than Please, read this or Lives depend on this before—as was bound to happen—he was seized by the scruff of the neck and jerked back, before he was identified as a fake and a possible danger and dragged away to prison by armed guards.

  What would happen to Sunny when he was taken into custody? He hadn’t thought of that, either!

  Max needed to make a plan, but his attention skipped around like a small child, distracted and delighted by details of the rooms they paraded through, the murals of gardens in which gods and goddesses picnicked, or played lutes, or simply draped themselves with flowers. In other rooms, painted animals lived in harmony together, the lion and the lamb asleep under the same tree, the fox and the rabbit peeping out from under the same rosebush at an infant asleep in its cradle. Cool marble floors flowed under his feet and huge mirrors in wide golden frames reflected the light pouring in through tall windows. After a while, they arrived at what one of the liveried servants, Pierre or Will, he didn’t know which, called the anteroom, which was small, wood-paneled, chairless, and empty. There, they waited.

  It took Sunny no time at all to smell out everything in that little room and settle herself at Max’s feet. Marguerite sat cross-legged on the floor beside the dog, to whisper into her ear and scratch under her chin. Nanny Rose pulled a little wooden horse on wheels from her apron pocket and gave it to Horatio, while preparing Marielle for disappointment. “You mustn’t set your heart on lessons. It’s only a few weeks until you return to Monsieur. Your mother would want you to be patient.”

  Marielle looked sideways at Max and gripped her hands together behind her back.

  Max couldn’t help her out, although he sympathized with her. He, too, had had to argue his case in order to be allowed art lessons. Why was it, he wondered, that parents—even actors, even Kings, neither of whom had to be conventional about things—didn’t want their children to learn the things the children chose, but only the things the parents preferred? He tried to put an expression of artistic dreaminess mixed with trustworthiness on his face.

  They waited and waited, the young members of the royal family more well-behaved than any other children Max had ever seen as they waited and waited. Even when Horatio tired of his toy horse, he was contented with the stories Nanny Rose told him in a low voice.

  Max shifted from one foot to the other and tried to find something to look at. The room had two doors. There were only two windows, tall and narrow and uncurtained. There were no murals, only mirrors, and he did not want to look into any mirrors. He shifted his weight again and half listened to Nanny Rose: “And then, the three billy goats gruff all ate their fill of the sweet grass on the other side of the bridge.” Horatio yawned and Max thought it must be past noon, past lunchtime, although the way time was dragging it might be only eleven o’clock; and he himself yawned.

  Finally, a door opened. Four men in shirtsleeves and linen trousers, not suits, came out, talking among themselves and turning back to consult with younger men, who were wearing dark suits and starched collars, who carried notebooks and piles of papers and had pens in their hands or, in one case, behind his ear. Max had no time to think about who they might be, because the two servants in livery were hurrying his group into the presence of the King, and Max had Sunny to keep hold of because in this new, long, wide, carpeted, and window-lined room there were places to run to and sniff out, and the tempting oiled leather of the boots worn by the four soldiers who stood on guard. Sunny tugged at her leash, but Max held her close to his side.

  The three children ran up to their father but halted a foot away from him and stood silent until he bent down to give each one a kiss on the top of his or her shining head. In the company of his children, Teodor gave them his complete attention, and this gave Max a chance to consider the King, close up.

  The King was a slight man, and not tall. His dark hair was graying and his face, as he addressed his children, was amused, the dark eyes alight, a smile dancing on his mouth. His close-shaven chin was a firm one, his nose was long and thin, and he looked at that moment like any other fond father in the company of his family. “What is it that’s so urgent with you three?” he asked the two Princesses and Horatio, bending a little to be closer to them.

  “I have my horsie!” Horatio answered, thrusting the toy at his father, who chuckled while also listening to Marguerite and Marielle saying at the same time, “I want to play with the dog” and “I could have drawing lessons. He’s an artist, he could teach me.”

  “One at a time,” said the King. He didn’t even look up at the people who had accompanied his children into the room, the usual two servants and the nanny, and a fourth, non-childish shape. He didn’t look at the dog, either. His attention was captured and held by his children.

  “And the billy goats gruff all ran safely across the bridge,” Horatio offered.

  “That was lucky,” the King said. “You do know, don’t you, Horatio? That there are no trolls under any bridge in my land. So you can cross bridges just as slowly as you like.”

  Marielle grabbed her father’s sleeve and pulled gently. The King bent to listen. “I really want to take lessons from him. Nanny Rose says I have to wait, but he’s here and Kent-at-the-gate says he’s an artist and if I have to go for four more whole weeks without even one lesson I’ll forget how,” she pleaded.

  “I don’t like to contradict Nanny Rose,” the King said. “She has good reasons for whatever she says.”

  “He has a dog,” urged Marguerite from his other sleeve.

  “Oh, well,” the King laughed. “A dog changes everything, doesn’t it?” he teased, and then he did glance up.

  He glanced up and saw a stranger, a red beret, and a large dog that wagged her tail in a friendly fashion, a golden retriever, probably safe for his children. Max unclipped his envelope, to have his appeal ready in his hand, and the King’s attention was caught by the movement.

  Then Teodor looked right at Max, and he straightened to his full height. He looked at Max and his expression became…became what? Not angry. Became kingly, rather stern, thoughtful. The King looked the way Lorenzo Apiedi, the hero of A Patriot’s Story, might have looked, had his uprising succeeded in ousting the tyrant, had he not been hanged young. There was a hardness in the King’s face n
ow which reminded Max of the portraits of all the past Barons Barthold, men of wealth who exercised great power. Just because this King was wise enough to listen to his advisers and forward-looking enough to give over many of his royal powers to the elected representatives of his people, that didn’t mean he wasn’t also the King, wealthier and more powerful than any baron, much more formidable.

  “Sire,” Max began, and wondered if he should fall onto one knee.

  “Nanny? Take the children,” the King ordered. “Leave me now, children. No discussion. Will, Pierre, you’ll accompany them. Let the Queen know I may come a few minutes late to luncheon and she should sit down without me,” he said. Then he held out a hand to halt the four soldiers, who had stepped closer, ready to defend him, and he gave the order. “Withdraw to the anteroom. No need to fear. I don’t think he has a weapon.” He looked into Max’s eyes to demand, “Do you?”

  Max could barely speak. He shook his head and mumbled, “No, sir. Your Majesty.”

  This was worse than stage fright, when you know that if you open your mouth, nothing will come out of it. Or if something does, it will be only a little high squeak, nothing that makes sense. Max had almost forgotten what it felt like to be a twelve-year-old boy, in trouble with someone in authority.

  As the soldiers left the room, Max thrust the envelope at the King. King Teodor took it, but he did not look at it. Instead, he studied Max’s face.

  Sunny sat quietly at Max’s side.

  Max took a breath. “That letter explains—” he began, but King Teodor waved his hand impatiently.

  “Where are your parents?” he demanded.

  “What?” Max asked. “What?”

  “It is customary to remove your hat in the presence of your King,” Teodor instructed sternly.

  Max took off the beret and clutched it in his hand. He didn’t know what to think. He could think of nothing to say. He had no idea—

  “I hope it’s my buttons in this envelope, now you’ve finally— You took your own sweet time answering the signal. What the devil are your parents playing at?”

  “What?” Max asked again, stupidly. “What signal?” He was dumbfounded, dumbstruck, and almost afraid. He didn’t understand anything—and then, to make everything worse, at the look on Max’s face the King burst out laughing.

  It was a fine laugh King Teodor had, rich and royal. Max felt a goopy smile begin on his own face at the sound of that laugh.

  “All right, boy, come here. I don’t mean to bully you. It’s just that I’ve been waiting ever since I arrived…and I’ve been very worried. Let’s have a glass of lemonade—” And the King led Max, Sunny still close at his side, to a long table where he pulled out a chair for Max to sit in and pulled out another for himself.

  Sunny, reassured by something in the King’s voice, moved over with great sweeps of her tail to sniff at the hand that was held out, inviting her attention. Max, also reassured, took the tall glass the King offered him. He drank.

  The King drank. He watched Max.

  Max had the feeling that a subject should always wait for the King to speak, so he waited.

  The King smiled, perfectly pleasantly, an ordinary nice smile on the face of an ordinary nice man, and said, “You’ve got the look of your mother about you. You’re the boy, the son. Max. They never told me much about you. How old are you?”

  “Almost thirteen, but why would my parents be talking to you?”

  “They’re my agents. You didn’t know? They’ve been my agents since before you—”

  Max interrupted. “You mean spies?”

  The King shrugged.

  Max insisted, “You mean, people who sneak into other countries and steal their secrets?”

  “If you think about it,” King Teodor answered with a teasing, teacherly expression, “not all of the secrets a nation keeps have to do with weapons or planning attacks. If you think about it, sometimes knowing what is really going on in a nation—or in a city, or in a countryside—can allow you to offer the right kind of help at the right time. Nations are proud, at least as proud as people and maybe even more so—and national pride can be just as dangerous as personal pride. Or it can be a strength, of course; that, too.”

  Max thought of the Baroness Barthold and how her own pride and her ancient family pride made her life a prison. He thought of Lorenzo Apiedi, even if he was only a character in a play, and how pride had helped him make, and keep to, the noble choices. He thought about history and the things that had happened because one nation or another, or one tribe or another, had felt shamed, or insulted, or even just—and this was often the case—so proud of its own strength or the rightness of its position that it made foolish and self-destructive decisions.

  After he had thought for a long minute, Max asked, “Exactly what did they do? When they were your agents.”

  “Three years ago—for one example? You will remember that the Company toured in the northern countries.”

  Max nodded. He remembered that time and how his parents had refused to let him go with them, despite all his arguments. Their reasons were good enough, and genuine, as he had known even at the time. But he had also seen that they were sorry to miss the chance to introduce him to a new landscape and new peoples, for which reason they would have liked to say yes. He remembered thinking at the time that if he could just think of one or two more arguments that would tip them over the line, they would notify his school and he would pack his bag and they would be off together. But that hadn’t happened. Maybe now he knew why.

  “While touring there, especially in the smaller cities, they heard rumors about a failed wheat crop—too much spring rain, then a long summer drought, if I remember. Knowing that, I could see to it that our grain and beer, our cheeses, were made available at a consistently low price, and I could build up a store of woolens and medicines to offer, should the winter prove harsh and sickness spread, especially among the poor. Not all information gathered in secret is intended to be used to the disadvantage of another, Max,” the King said. He took a long, slow drink and admitted, “It happens that I am proud to think of myself as a king who is also a good citizen of the world.”

  “That was the kind of information my parents brought you?”

  “Mostly. Perhaps four times over the fifteen years they brought back word of armies being increased along one of our borders, or someone spreading rumors among his people to make them fear us. Or they smuggled someone across a border to safety a few times over the years, because— You must know that your father’s an adventurer, and such men enjoy danger. You do know that?”

  “Yes, and my mother…is not unwilling.”

  “Your mother is not any kind of a coward, I agree. So now you know, and I’m glad they told you about the buttons.”

  “But they didn’t,” Max said. “Do you want them back? Because I have them at home.”

  “Your father didn’t tell you about the signal code?”

  Max shook his head.

  “About being my spies?”

  Max shook his head again.

  “Hmm,” Teodor said. Then, because a good king has a broad streak of practicality, “Yes, I would like the buttons returned. But in that case, why have you come here? Unless—is it an accident that you’re here?”

  Max shook his head for the third time.

  Now it was Teodor taking time to think. After a while, he asked, “Where are your parents? Your father fobbed me off with some story about India, but that’s too far-fetched to be believable. I know they’ve left the city, but they didn’t tell me their true destination, and, frankly? I think I’ve put too much gold into their hands for your father to try to gull me.”

  Suddenly it was very important to Max that the King should know that his parents had been telling him the truth. “They believed they were going to India. There were first-class tickets on a boat called the Flower of Kashmir, which didn’t exist. We all thought we were going. Really, sir. Sire. Your Majesty.”

  “Sir w
ill do. You mean the invitation was a fraud?”

  “Yes! It wasn’t until after they’d gone that we realized…” Max let that sentence drift off, distracted by a sudden realization: “That’s where all those gold coins come from, isn’t it? You paid them in gold coins.”

  King Teodor looked confused.

  Max waved his hands, to wave this unimportant fact away, and told the King, “They really did believe the invitation was genuine. There was a ticket for me, too, when they asked for it. Or at least they were told it would be on the ship, waiting for me.” Now he wondered, “Do you think it was? But I had an art lesson that morning, a final lesson, with Joachim.”

  Now it was the King who waved away an unimportant fact, so that Max would get on with the story.

  “When I got to the docks, I was on time, but it turned out there was no vessel with that name there. And,” he added quickly, “none of the manifests of any of the ships that sailed from Queensbridge that morning had any passengers on them that sounded like they could have been my parents.”

  “If they were in disguise?” the King suggested.

  “Except, I was given a message by the Harbormaster, a note from my father. It was just a few lines which made no sense at the time, so we had to conclude that they really had sailed on one of the boats. My grandmother and me.”