The Book of Kings

by Cynthia Voigt

  Max moved forward.

  Another set of soldiers now escorted the first families of Apapa into the plaza. There was Stefano with his two pretty daughters, only their profiles visible under lacy mantillas, followed by his wife and four sons; then the Carrera y Carreras came all together, wives, daughters, sons, and the fathers last in their dark suits, jackets fitted close to the waist, white ruffled shirts, flat-brimmed black felt hats, silver buttons and buckles and spurs glittering in the sun. Captain Malpenso marched half a dozen soldiers in to form a line just to the side of the foreigners, a position from which they could overlook the assemblage as well as the stage.

  As the Queen entered, led by soldiers and followed by soldiers, Max moved deep into the crowd. The Queen was swollen with child, it seemed, although Max now knew she was swollen with pillow, and she nodded a greeting to the embassy but gave recognition to no one else. Her bright brown hair gleamed under the shining, three-pointed crown. She sat down heavily in the straight-backed chair, awkward with pretended pregnancy.

  The air vibrated with curiosity and anticipation. Occasionally, a booted foot shifted, someone coughed, or a baby gave a cry that was quickly muffled.

  This was theater, Max thought. The stage was set, the action poised to begin as soon as the main characters entered to deliver the opening lines of the drama. Unless, he thought, this was the last act, with everything already set in motion and only the inevitable ending to be arrived at.

  Max kept the brim of his hat low enough to hide his eyes but not so low that he couldn’t look around. He saw his grandmother, Joachim at her shoulder, her eyes and attention fixed on the Queen’s expressionless profile. He saw Ari, calmly resting one hand on the hilt of his sword. He noted the way Mr. Bendiff nodded across the aisle to Juan Carlos and Juan Antonio and Juan Luc, nodded to their wives and sons and daughters—probably noticing more than he seemed to, was Max’s guess. He was immediately proved right when Mr. Bendiff’s glance stumbled briefly on him, and moved on. Tomi and Colly must have melted into the crowd to become just two more heads under chupallas, because Max couldn’t find them.

  The sound of booted feet marching in unison announced the arrival of the prisoner. He arrived within a human cage of eight soldiers, all carrying rifles, as if they thought he might snap the chain that ran between his handcuffed wrists and require them to shoot. The soldiers escorted him to stand at what Max was calling stage right, too far from his Queen to take her hand, and then they stepped back to wait an arm’s length behind him.

  The King still wore the formal uniform of two days ago, now crumpled and stained, but his crown was gone. He had a two-day growth of beard on his chin. He stood straight and proud, unafraid, although when he looked at his Queen, he did not smile. His manacled hands hung down before him. His feet were a little apart, his high boots unpolished. He did not speak.

  The General was the last to enter, alone and unescorted. His uniform was the fathomless black of a midnight sky and its silver buttons shone like distant stars. The General did not remove his plumed shako when he seated himself in the great carved judge’s chair at stage left. His gloved hands rested on the sheathed sword that lay across his lap, and for a long moment he stared wordlessly at the King. At last he spoke and the play began.

  “You stand accused of murder,” the General said. “How do you answer?”

  “Not guilty,” the King proclaimed, and his voice rang with the truth of that.

  They spoke in the King’s native tongue, which only the Carrera y Carreras and the visiting foreigners could comprehend. A murmur of discontent spread around the crowd. “¿Qué dice el General?” “¿Qué dice el Rey?” “¿Esta es tree-ya-la?”

  The General must not have foreseen this difficulty, because he had no translator ready. “Juan Carlos?” he asked, signaling to Juan Carlos to step forward. “Can you act as interpreter to the people?”

  Juan Carlos seemed reluctant. “But, General, you have the language better.”

  “The judge cannot be also the interpreter. You are the most able man here present,” Balcor said impatiently. “I ask that you translate my questions and the prisoner’s responses, adding nothing, leaving nothing out.”

  Then Juan Carlos moved to the General’s side. The stage now held the three men, two at one side, one standing alone at the other. Between them, impossible to forget, loomed that tall, shrouded shape. Two of the men, the General and the King, faced one another while the third, the interpreter, faced the crowd.

  The General repeated his question and the King answered again, “Not guilty,” and the interpreter translated for the crowd. Then, without rising from his chair, the General gave an order. “Capitán.”

  Captain Malpenso walked slowly toward the shrouded shape. His spurs sparkled in the sunlight, his steps sounded like slow drumbeats, his long-legged black figure approached the tall black thing. He halted beside it and turned to face Balcor, ready.

  The General gave another order, this time to the crowd: “Remove your hats before the law.”

  Max’s hand had come as high as his shoulder before he remembered that he should not understand the words. Quickly, he lowered it, and did not dare to look around from under the brim of his hat to see if he had been noticed. Juan Carlos translated and Max reached up, again, to uncover his head.

  And met the dark eyes—just for one beat—of General Balcor. The General’s glance moved on, skimming the crowd, making sure all the men stood with uncovered heads, but Max could not look away from the unsmiling face.

  —

  Balcor recognized the boy by his eyes. He thought, as he had when he had first glimpsed him beside the handsome, red-headed Baron, that his eyes were the color of the mountains. Not the lower slopes, where livestock could feed and a hardworking farmer could grow maize and yams enough to feed his family for a winter, but the high, stony reaches of his mountains, worn by winds and water down to their iron-gray hearts, the three peaks that protected his country from outside forces and held in their bellies enough wealth to purchase a decent life for every Andesian. He looked quickly away. He had his own business afoot, and he did not intend to be thwarted by this boy. There needed to be this trial, however much of a mockery it might seem to the visitors. “Now!” he ordered the Captain, and did not trouble himself to see how his poor actor greeted the sight.

  —

  Captain Malpenso reached up and pulled on the thick, braided rope. The dark cloth fell to the ground, where nobody paid any attention to it, so fixed were all eyes on the thing now revealed. Max knew it immediately, although he’d never before seen a gallows. The wooden beam reached out over the small platform, and the dismal rope, knotted and ready, hung down.

  “Prisoner. I ask again,” General Balcor said, from the judge’s chair. “How do you answer the accusation?”

  Juan Carlos translated.

  “Not guilty,” the prisoner answered, for the third time.

  Juan Carlos translated.

  This two-language dialogue gave a stately pace to the proceedings. It was like a man crippled in one leg walking, step-drag, step-drag. Max felt his hands clenching and unclenching and tried to stop them.

  “By what reason do you say Not guilty?” the General asked.

  Juan Carlos translated.

  “By reason of self-defense,” the prisoner answered. “If a man is attacked, may he not, in this country, defend himself?”

  Juan Carlos translated, but when he had finished, he turned to the General. “Sir, I was there, you were present as well, as were many of us, and we all saw. It was the King who first drew his sword.”

  “Translate that, too,” General Balcor ordered.

  Max thought now that he could guess Balcor’s intention for this trial: to show his people that not even the King was above the law, and thus convince them to entrust their own quarrels to its justice, for which the General would speak. But when you are the only judge, he thought, the law is yours.

  The prisoner-King argued his case. �
�He attacked first, with words. May a man not, in this country, defend his wife’s reputation? Which is part of his own honor—and what kind of a man does not defend his honor?”

  Juan Carlos translated. To these points, there were a few murmurs of agreement from the crowd, and the prisoner-King stood straighter.

  The Queen, Max saw, never took her eyes from her husband’s face. He noticed that his grandmother had moved until she was the person in the audience closest to the Queen’s chair, and Joachim was still at her side.

  General Balcor answered: “A man does not bleed from words. They are not knives or bullets. Nor are they stones, to merely bruise. A man bleeds his life away from being run through by a sword, which is not the same as a sentence carrying an evil thought, be that thought false or true.”

  Juan Carlos translated.

  The General spoke again: “Words do not kill. It was your sword that killed.”

  Juan Carlos translated.

  “You are guilty,” the General announced.

  Juan Carlos translated, but Max was watching his father. The King’s manacled hand reached out for the Queen, whose own hand lifted slightly, almost invisibly, from her swollen lap, as if the two could clasp hands and raise them in their old coded gesture, Trouble.

  Tears spilled from her eyes and ran down her cheeks.

  So. The play was done. General Balcor, as writer and director and star of the performance, intended to leave the King at the end of the rope and himself in power—perhaps on the throne, perhaps only the land’s sole judge—to write and interpret the law. There was the problem, laid out plain and clear in front of Max. The solution, if Max could think of it, would have to put a stop to General Balcor’s ambitions, if that was possible; in any case, it would have to somehow save his father’s life.

  Slowly, the General rose to his feet. He addressed his words to the prisoner, but his eyes were on the assembled people. “William Starling, crowned King of Andesia, the law finds you guilty of the willful murder of another man.”

  Juan Carlos translated, and murmurs ran through the crowd, in which Max heard repeatedly, as question and as answer, the word ley, the law.

  “Therefore,” the General said, “you are sentenced to hang by the neck until dead.”

  Juan Carlos translated this and a silence fell. Into the silence came Juan Carlos’s ringing voice, “As is right and just!”

  There was only one thing for Max to do, and what would happen after that he had no idea. He opened his mouth to announce himself, because if there was no dead man, there could be no murder. After that, the argument marched logically on: If there was no murder, there was no murderer. If there was no murderer, there need be no hanging.

  But General Balcor’s dark eyes were on him. And the General gave a short, almost imperceptible shake of his head. Shocked, Max hesitated.

  Hesitating, Max wondered: Why that shake of the General’s head? Why would he want Max to stay hidden? Because Balcor would have a reason—but was it the best reason, as the General claimed, the reason of law, or was it the worst, the reason of greed and ambition, as Max and Grammie had always supposed? More important, could Max best serve his father by insisting on his own plans or by following Balcor’s? He could either speak up or stay silent, and both were risky choices. He looked at the General-Judge-Playwright and decided to continue in the role Balcor had assigned him—at least for a little while longer. He was a minor actor, no more than one voice in a crowd, what could he do?

  And as if all he had to do was ask the right question, Max saw a chance. Had an idea. A good idea. A possible plan.

  He slid backward, deeper into the crowd. When he was so hidden behind two men and a woman with a squirming child in her arms that he would not be noticed from the stage, he remarked to his neighbors, in Spanish that he hoped was convincing, “Andesians are people who kill kings, yes?” He said this as a man might remark on his good luck at cards or his pleasure at the taste of sausage. He must have said it well enough because there were a few murmured responses, both denials and laughing acknowledgments, as Max moved, backward, sideways, to another position.

  There, “It takes a brave man to sit on the throne in Andesia,” said Max, still low-voiced. “Or a fool,” he laughed softly, and moved forward, sideways.

  Murmured responses followed him, growing louder. At his next stop, which put him close to the front of the crowd and also to General Balcor, he proclaimed sadly, and more loudly, “We have become a bloodthirsty people.”

  “Who speaks so?” General Balcor called out, in Spanish, but he directed his accusing gaze to the people gathered close to the Queen’s chair, as if the voice had come from there, even though Max stood almost directly in front of him. Max called out his answer, hoping that he might get all of his line spoken before the General found him. “No wonder it was a foreigner, a stranger, they found to wear the crown.”

  Now a woman’s voice answered, in Spanish, “A foolish and jealous foreigner, and see what he has come to.”

  The General searched over the crowd, and Juan Carlos, standing in front of him, made an effort to quiet the people, many of whom were now repeating Max’s words. Some added words of their own. “We should not have welcomed a foreigner!” “Why would any stranger wish to rule here, if not for the wealth of the mines?”

  One of the Carrera y Carreras spoke out then, but which one, Max couldn’t tell. “Good people, listen to me, please. What will this distinguished embassy think of us, if the blood of another king stains our land? Will they still talk of visitors, coming to walk our fields and climb our mountains and be guests in our homes? Will they wish to take our woven scarves and chupallas back to their homeland, as gifts for the women and men of their own country, if we are such a people?”

  Several voices answered him. “What’s that to me?” “We are beasts to work the fields and the mines, how would visitors help us?” “Will visitors protect my children from the soldier who carries them off?”

  The King looked around a little wildly. “What are they saying? What is going on?”

  Quietly now, Max asked a woman standing beside him, “Was it not that Captain with the eyes of a hawk? Who took my son away?” His question spread out around him, but in whispers: “Look, isn’t that the man?”

  Balcor said nothing, not to the King, not to Juan Carlos, but he watched everything, the prisoner-King and the foreign embassy, the first citizens of Apapa clustered together among their dependents, the mass of people that filled the square. Sometimes his head turned to the gallows, and the dark man standing beside it, as if to reassure himself that it was still there, and he checked the positions of the soldiers who lined the outer edges of the plaza. He did not respond to anything that was being said. He waited for the right moment to speak again.

  Max watched Balcor, and moved to a new position in the crowd, but he had no idea what more he might say to stir things up. So, like Balcor, he waited.

  Juan Luc stepped forward and then turned to face the people, to ask, “Do you not see? If there are tourists and if there are people in other lands who wish to wear our scarves and hats, then any man who knows the hills and the mountains can be their guide, and earn silver for himself. Any woman who can clean a room and cook a meal can welcome strangers, and earn enough to add a second room onto her house for her aging parents, and ensure her children medicines. Anyone who can spin, dye, and weave, who braids straw, they too can earn for themselves, and the only ones who need go into the mines are those who choose to do so for wages. Those wages will be offered if a man can choose to earn his bread otherwise. Do you see this?”

  Louder voices discussed this. The King fulminated and fumed and demanded that Balcor or Juan Carlos translate for him, but both of those men ignored him. The Queen sat tense, her hands tightly gripping one another, her eyes on her husband.

  Juan Antonio finished his cousin’s argument. “This embassy must not think ours is a violent country. If they do, why would they carry word of Andesia out into
the world, except to say that we are a people who slay our kings?”

  At that, Juan Carlos called out loudly, “I will not have a murderer for my King! Let there be an Andesian King for Andesia!”

  Two things happened simultaneously. The King cried, “What is happening? Balcor, tell me!” and Captain Malpenso gave an order, and the line of soldiers began to move to the front of the stage, rifles held ready. Were they there to protect the General? The embassy? The King and Queen? The process of the law? Max couldn’t tell, and they might just as easily have been there to fire into the crowd. People backed away from the soldiers, from the guns. Max pushed sideways to get closer to where his mother sat silent and pale, weeping, and he saw Colly making his way to Ari and Mr. Bendiff, where they waited, alert and unsure. Where was Tomi?

  “¡Soldados!” General Balcor called. “¡Alto!” The soldiers looked over their shoulders, back to Captain Malpenso, who had ordered them forward, and then to the General, who had ordered them to halt. Everyone watching stiffened and got ready to throw himself on the ground or, in Max’s case, toward the Queen.

  “Return to your posts!” Balcor ordered, and the soldiers, obedient to their General, withdrew, to stand again at the side of the plaza.

  Juan Carlos called out again, “An Andesian King for Andesia!” and the crowd rumbled.

  Standing in front of his judge’s chair, General Balcor considered this. “Whom do you propose? Yourself?”

  Whatever the General might have expected by way of a response, Juan Carlos shrugged, and smiled, and bowed, accepting the honor. A few voices picked up the idea and began to demand it. “Juan Carlos for King,” they chanted. “An Andesian King for Andesia.” “Juan Carlos for Andesia.” Some voices continued, “Juan Carlos for Andesia,” while a rumble of angry voices grew in the background. “That Captain, yes, it’s him.” “I remember those eyes.” “He is the man.” “Let the law punish the man who took our children away. To slavery, and death, in the mines.” “Why should his uniform protect him? We would see that law, too, in Andesia!”