The Book of Kings

by Cynthia Voigt

  “Hang them both!” a man cried. “Hang the Captain beside his King!”

  Max looked at his father and saw fear. He saw that Grammie had reached a spot close enough to put a hand on her daughter’s shoulder, despite the efforts of a soldier to crowd her away. He looked at Juan Carlos, who seemed to have grown taller, and then he looked at Ari, who was saying something into Mr. Bendiff’s ear and looking around him, maybe for an exit route, maybe for Max and the other boys. He looked back at his father and saw fear vanquished by courage, as William Starling transformed himself into a King worthy of the name. Then, finally, Max looked at General Balcor. The man seemed, as always, a small person in a uniform, a small person made taller by his shako and made imposing by his uniform, a man with eyes that watched everything, with a face unaccustomed to smiling.

  Small he might have been, but when the General raised a gloved hand, silence spread slowly out before him, spread over the entire plaza, until everyone stopped speaking. Into the waiting quiet, “There has been a murder,” the General said in Spanish.

  This the General translated himself. At those words, William Starling answered him. Even crownless, even with his hands manacled together, his royal nature was there for all to see. “I will serve the law,” he announced.

  An impatient and confused murmur answered this.

  “Translate!” Balcor ordered.

  “With pleasure,” said Juan Carlos, who repeated the King’s words in Spanish. “Dice: Yo servirá a la ley.”

  Desperately, Max called out in his best Spanish, “That is a true King who speaks.”

  It was Juan Carlos who answered this, with a shake of the head, denying it. “That is a murderer who speaks. In this land, who takes a life must give one.”

  “Captain Malpenso,” the General ordered, and the Captain came forward, to stand beside the prisoner-King.

  Even more desperately, because despite the General’s shake of the head Max could do nothing more now than come forward, Max called out, again in Spanish, “Who kills a king is a traitor.”

  “It is the rope that kills,” Juan Carlos answered, and added with a smile, “the traitorous rope.”

  Max stared at Juan Carlos, who was looking at the Captain while the Captain waited for the General to order the execution to begin. “Easy, Eyes,” a voice spoke softly in his ear, while a hand on his arm warned him to silence. But Max understood it now: Juan Carlos intended to have the throne himself, to have the King’s shares of the copper mines and the royal treasury, too, for himself, and for that reason he was careless of the failure of the silver mine. Was Juan Carlos, then, in cahoots with General Balcor?

  As if to answer that question, Balcor moved to stage center. “Captain,” he said, speaking the language of the embassy, “unchain the prisoner.” He turned to face the people. “Translate that, Juan Carlos,” he said, “and also this: The law will rule Andesia, and that rule will not begin with the traitorous hanging of a crowned King.”

  Captain Malpenso gripped the prisoner’s shoulder.

  “Will this foreigner be our King?” Juan Carlos protested, in Spanish.

  “Translate,” ordered Balcor.

  Juan Carlos heard his protest echoing from the crowd behind him and did not obey the General. Instead, he repeated, “Will this foreigner be our King?” and the cries began again, “Juan Carlos for King!”

  Soldiers moved around the edges of the crowd. Balcor drew a pistol. With one hand Captain Malpenso turned the King to face him and his free hand moved to his own belt. To unchain the King? Or to drag him to the gallows? Max shoved his way through to his father, with Tomi just behind him, and saw that Ari was doing the same, while Mr. Bendiff stood with the two Carrera y Carrera cousins, consulting with them, it seemed from the quick glimpse Max took. But his father was manacled and weaponless, and judging from the sounds behind him, when they were hidden safe within a mob the people did not fear either Malpenso or the General.

  Max didn’t know if it was the crowd or his own fear that roared in his ears. Men were pushing forward and women were pulling their children to the rear and he needed to get to his father before the mob did. Two to defend the prisoner was twice one, even if Tomi was armed only with a knife, and if Ari could find his way there it would be three, enough to encircle the King and protect him with their blades.

  A shot cracked through the voices. Silence crashed down on the plaza.

  For a long three seconds not one person moved, not even Max.

  In that frozen time he saw: that Malpenso’s left arm was bleeding and in his right he held a long-bladed knife. That his father had his eyes fixed on Balcor’s raised pistol and had not seen the real danger.

  Max hurled himself forward, knocking his father off balance and onto the ground. At the same time, one of the soldiers who had been guarding the King seized Malpenso and another tore the knife from his hand. Now the voices cried out in surprise and confusion.

  The noise subsided, as Max dusted himself off, and in obedience to a small gesture of the General’s hand—

  The General was writer and director and chief performer, Max reminded himself.

  —slipped back into the cover of the crowd. “What is happening?” was the question he heard, although nobody could answer it. “What does this mean?”

  Ari had stepped forward to offer the prisoner a hand up, as if it had been he who knocked him down and saved him. Despite manacled wrists, the King rose gracefully to his feet and bowed his head in a brief thank-you. At the same time, General Balcor took two steps forward and the soldiers surrounding the Captain stepped away, so that the hawk-faced soldier stood alone before his commander. “What are you about, Captain Malpenso?” the General demanded, in a voice that filled the entire plaza. “I did not order you to slay the prisoner.” He spoke in Spanish but did not bother about translation, as if he knew full well that the Ambassador could understand him.

  Captain Malpenso did not answer. His eyes flicked from the General to the Carrera y Carreras, and then to the soldiers lining the plaza, as if looking for an escape. His eyes flicked back to the gallows and his face grew pale.

  It was Ari who answered, speaking slow Spanish, his voice calm. “He was about treason, General. For the King is still the King.” Ari then spoke to Max’s father, translating.

  Balcor nodded. He spoke pensively to Malpenso, as if an idea were just occurring to him. “I have often wondered who murdered the last King of Andesia. And his family. All of whom were under my protection. It was a great shame to me when they were slain, and a worry to me when some unknown assailant shot at the new King in Caracas. I knew you had ridden at the head of the escort to the coronation and now I wonder about you, now that I see that you are a man who dares to kill a King.”

  Malpenso shook his head, to deny the charge, but he had grown even paler and his dark eyes seemed to burn. Ari spoke into the King’s ear, Max saw, and Grammie into her daughter’s. Every other person in the plaza kept a trembling silence.

  General Balcor continued: “With the aid of a chosen few soldiers, I suspect, and they are not so much to blame since soldiers must follow orders. A soldier who is following orders does not share the guilt of he who gave the order.”

  One of the men standing close to Malpenso was very surprised to hear this, and not displeased, if Max knew anything about reading the expression on a face. This soldier stepped back another pace from the Captain, putting a distance between them.

  “And if I, too, was under orders?” Malpenso cried.

  “I gave no such command,” Balcor declared. “Not then. Not now.”

  No one doubted his word.

  “You are not the only one to give me orders,” Malpenso answered.

  In the group near Mr. Bendiff, someone stirred, or several someones stirred. Max couldn’t be sure.

  “Why should I hang alone, when I was told what to do, whom to strike and where and when? As I was. When a bomb was placed into my hands? As it was. And I will tell you by whom. By Juan
Carlos Carrera y Carrera! And I was promised his daughter Elizaveta in marriage so that my children might inherit the throne. If I did kill that King, and his family, how do you think I was given entrance to the castle stronghold if not in the company of Juan Carlos Carrera y Carrera?”

  “Liar!” cried Juan Carlos. “He lies!”

  Malpenso smiled, as a hawk might smile, sinking its talons into a squealing rabbit. “Ask the soldiers what they saw, my General. He has plotted to bring you down!”

  Juan Carlos protested again, “He lies!” and turned to Mr. Bendiff. “It was he who had Suela put the snake in the Envoy’s rooms.” Then he turned to Ari. “Suela will tell you everything.”

  “Ask the soldiers,” Malpenso repeated.

  “As if I’d ever waste Elizaveta’s beauty on such as you,” sneered Juan Carlos.

  General Balcor replaced his pistol in its holster and gave the order to the soldiers surrounding the Captain: “Take him to the prison.” He turned to point at Juan Carlos. “Take this man, too,” he ordered, with a gesture to three more soldiers. “Take him to the prison as well. Both men will be brought to trial,” he promised the crowd. “The law will judge them.”

  This seemed to satisfy the people. Or it may have been they were too stunned by the events to object to anything. The Carrera y Carreras gathered together, to leave the scene and decide how to understand and respond to everything that had happened. Before they had walked off, however, Juan Luc stepped forward, to announce loudly, first in Spanish for the people and then in English for the foreigners, “What my cousin has done, or not done, the rest of us had no knowledge or suspicion of. I speak for all of us. If Juan Carlos Carrera y Carrera is guilty, he must pay the price. We entrust him to the law.”

  The family left the plaza with heads bent to conceal faces that were shocked and troubled and, in one lovely case, shocked and angry. People stood back to give them free passage. The people looked to one another, surprised and silent, sensing that there was still something to come. In the silence, General Balcor turned back to the prisoner-King. “There remains this man, who is a murderer,” he announced, now translating for himself. “There remains this murderer, who is our crowned King. Under the law, he must die. Under the law, he must not be killed.”

  To this problem, nobody had any response. All eyes were on the General. He himself looked into the people before him, as if expecting the answer to come from among them, and his eyes did not seek Max out.

  But Max was the Solutioneer. He called out the answer, boldly and in Spanish, “This is not my King! Send him away! Send him out of our land!” He let silences fall between each statement, so that each one could hang in the air, as if framed in gold. “¡Que reine la ley!” Let the law be my King!

  When he heard his cries echoing around him, picked up by voices from all sides of the plaza, Max melted back into the thick of the crowd, to disappear. He left it to Balcor and Ari to work out the details.

  The Rescue

  • ACT III •

  SCENE 2 DENOUEMENT

  Max returned alone to the empty guesthouse. He noticed, but did not care about, the absence of the usual soldiers at the door. He was not curious to know what people were saying, about the trial, about the unmasking of guilty parties, about the foreigners. Max’s job was done.

  Once he’d opened all the shutters on the ground floor, put a pot of water on, and set glasses out, Max stood at the back door, looking out at the courtyard, at the stone tower, at the high peaks looming over everything, and it was not so very long before his mother’s voice called, “Max?”

  They met at the kitchen door. For a long, satisfying, silent time, all he did was stand with her arms wrapped around him and his own arms wrapped around her. He felt the pillow that covered her waist, and grinned to himself at the pillow-shaped deceit they both employed. They were alike, he and his mother.

  Eventually, they stepped back, to smile at one another. Grammie took advantage of the situation to move behind Max and pour hot water into the teapot, but she knew better than to say anything. It was one of the many good things about Grammie, Max thought—although he did not look away from the face he was seeing for the first time in months to think it, and he could not take the smile from his own face—the way she knew better than to interrupt strong feelings with words.

  When they were seated at the table, however, it was different. “Where’s…,” Max began, but didn’t know what to call his father. My father? The King? But he didn’t need to name him, because William Starling was always at the center of his wife’s world.

  “I think…I hope General Balcor will put him into the custody of that Baron.”

  “What else can he do, after pronouncing him guilty?” Max asked.

  “We can be sure he has a plan,” his mother said. “I only hope that was the last scene we just played.”

  “What else can happen?” That was Joachim, who entered the kitchen and the conversation at the same time, and fully expected some dismal response to his question.

  “Sit down, have some tea,” Grammie greeted him.

  Joachim didn’t take a seat until he had bowed to the Queen. “I don’t know if you remember me.”

  “Of course I do. It hasn’t been that long.”

  “It feels long to me,” Max said, but not unhappily.

  “Certainly not long enough to make me forget Joachim,” his mother said.

  “Are you really having a baby?” Max asked her then. He knew she was. Grammie had told him she was. But for some reason, he wanted his mother to tell him herself that she was.

  She laughed. “When you see me in my morning miseries you’ll know for sure.”

  “Will you be sick all the way until May?”

  She laughed again, and told him, “The pregnancy lasts until May, but the morning sickness has already started getting better. How do you feel about becoming a brother, at your age?”

  “Pretty good,” Max said. “I’m too old to be jealous.”

  She looked him in the eye, doubting this.

  “Not of a baby brother or sister,” he specified. “I’m not a child. And yes,” he added, “I do know a person of any age can be jealous. But that would be about other things.” What he didn’t say, because it might hurt her feelings, was that it was sort of a relief to think of them having someone else to take up their attention, because that would leave him more free to live his own life.

  “Don’t underestimate the boy,” Grammie warned. Max signaled her to not say more, with widened eyes that he hoped his mother wouldn’t notice.

  Luckily, his mother’s attention had turned to Joachim. “I know who you are, but what are you doing here?” she asked. “Here now, I mean. Here with Max and my mother.”

  “I’m making pictures. Drawing the flora, the people, the landscape, whatever I see that makes a picture. Officially, I’m the party’s artist,” he told her. “Although I’m not an official member of the embassy since King Teodor doesn’t know anything about me.” He explained himself, “I was running away, but it turns out I’m not.”

  This confused Mary Starling, but she had a different question. “So you are a genuine embassy,” she said to Grammie. “How did you manage that?”

  Max answered quickly. “Ari really is a Baron. The King really did send him, and Mr. Bendiff, too. You remember Bendiff’s Jams and Jellies?”

  “Beers and Ales?” Grammie added.

  “Of course.”

  “He’s the business adviser,” Max said.

  “You must have wondered why the King would send an embassy to Andesia,” Mary Starling remarked, and she looked around at them all, her mother, her son, Joachim, as if she was looking for something she didn’t want to find.

  Guessing that she hoped her role as a spy had not been revealed, Max suggested, “Maybe he saw the photograph in the newspaper, like we did. He’d recognize you, wouldn’t he? Because they came to the theater every summer, didn’t they?”

  “Several times each summer,”
she said, pleased at the memory and satisfied with the explanation. “So as soon as you heard about it you asked to be members of the party,” she decided.

  “We couldn’t let it go without us,” Grammie said. She understood that Max didn’t want to say anything about his own leading role in the events, even if she didn’t know why he wanted to keep silent.

  Max didn’t exactly know why himself, either.

  —

  It was Colly and Tomi who brought the first news. As they had hoped, Balcor had announced that the disgraced King would be exiled and remanded him into Ari’s custody to be immediately removed from Andesia. The three men would be along shortly. Further news was that the soldiers had all been told that those who wished to could remain in Apapa, to serve under General Balcor in the new Andesian army. The others were free to return to their home barracks.

  “Most of them seemed pleased to leave,” reported Tomi.

  Colly explained: “When you’re an occupying army, everybody fears you, and hates you.”

  “They’re soldiers. They want to fight,” Tomi added. “If they didn’t want to do that, they wouldn’t be soldiers, they’d have families and less dangerous jobs.”

  “What they are is adventurers,” Grammie said, and turned sternly to her daughter with an I warned you look in her eye.

  Max’s mother drank her tea and admitted, “This was more adventure than I was looking for.”

  “And William?” Grammie insisted. “Does he feel the same way?”

  “That same William,” Max’s father announced from the doorway, spreading his arms wide as if it were him welcoming them onto the scene rather than the opposite, “is about to embark on the adventure of another child!”

  In his presence, the room filled with life, and energy, and gladness. “Another child!” he repeated. “Think of the possibilities! Look at Max!” he urged them.

  Everybody looked at Max. William Starling went to stand behind Max, his hands on his son’s shoulders, but not to hold him down in his chair. Max could feel it, the way his father’s hands fitted around his shoulder bones, as if he was reassuring himself that Max was real. “I myself am very happy to be looking at Max. Although”—and now he moved around to look at his son’s face, with a forgiving smile but also a critical raised eyebrow—“what you were trying to do during that duel I don’t understand. Is there no room at this table for a King in exile?” he asked.