Unfettered

by Terry Brooks

  He picks his way across the great hall. Pelts conspire to trip him: red fox, ferret, wolverine, a huge black bear with claws and head intact, agate eyes watchful. The Magar has a passion for animals quite absent in his warden. He returns from Black Sea excursions with chained lynx, birds of prey astonished under leather hoods, grizzled elk heads limed for mounting.

  And every kind of dog! Even now, just audible over the wind, he hears their furious noise. Like a mercenary barracks, the kennel stands removed (but sufficiently visible) from the main gate of the palace, a nightmare space of snarls and excrement and flung bones. That howler, now: is that the Airedale, who leaps so fast the eye cannot follow? Or the Rhodesian devil, heaped with muscle to the point of deformity and raised on a diet of black flesh and beatings, until even a passing dark shirt opens the faucets of its bloodlust?

  Anton is glad to think of the salt marsh and swollen Danube between him and the Magar’s eye.

  He shuffles past the kitchen, its dangling Posnr hams, forbidden French chocolates. The splay-footed master staircase. The snicker of lowered visors on suits of mail at attention since the fifteenth century, the maid’s thorny broom propped insolent against one iron shoulder. And last, and most precious: the door of the library. His library, he always thinks. A portal to a kinder universe.

  Soon, he tells the door. Wait for me.

  His thoughts race: these storm-shutters, now. I’ve never bothered with them before. It’s never been so cold. Will my hands make music, or just go numb?

  Very much preoccupied with this last thought, he flips past the sighing curtain, and all at once stands gulping in the bitter strength of the gale.

  The palace wall cleaves straight down upon a cliff. Below is the Black Sea—roaring, angrier than he has ever seen it, a rabid infinity of foam. The land is broken and cruel, rock and slime and more rock and more slime, and directly before him a livid gash: a fissure astoundingly deep and wide. Over and into this wound in the rocks the surf is pouring, exploding skyward, rushing back with a monstrous slurp to cascade again.

  No less than a typhoon. But that crack, that canyon in the breakers—why can he not remember it? Surely it is named and known?

  You are addled, Anton. If you’re not careful you’ll forget your name.

  The rain has not arrived, but he sees it coming, a gray net dragged by thunderheads. There is the moon, too: also grossly huge. Never in his life has it loomed so large, not even at harvest, bloodshot on the world’s rim. And gripping the cornice, Anton begins to consider the moon’s intentions.

  Do they not say that it commands the tides, after all? Of whose making this unnatural surf, if not the moon’s? Could it be seeking, in some private malevolence, to tug the sea’s wide lip over the land, over the palace itself, as an impatient nurse tugs bedclothes over a child’s head?

  He has read of corals and anemones, and teeth of sharks, fused in the Carpathian foothills, millions of years old. Where had the shore stood then? How many meters of soundless sea assured the Black that this land, here, was forever hers? How long had she suffered no other’s touch on this deep-sea shelf, none but the moon’s, gently exciting her, lifting her waters, smoothing the glide of her round-eyed children? When had men come, hooking those children through the gills?

  Can they hate—the moon, and natural things?

  The cold light ambles on the surf; the wet wind claws with nails of salt.

  Then Anton laughs, his intensity at once merely comic. He grins at the storm, the moon, the white-toothed waves. They are beautiful.

  “You are beautiful! Tell me: how will my sonata go tonight, eh? A sign for the suffering artist? No? Nothing?”

  Throwing the bolt on the last shutter of the great hall, he feels instantly warmer. The gale drops to a whisper: these walls so thick that melon-sized shot from Russian cannon lie still undiscovered in the stone, they say. He returns to the hearth, where his torch rubs orange fins together, glad to see him. Its warmth runs up his arm and across his chest. But once out of the wall socket, the flame still cowers, writhes, and he knows the wind has not conceded him the palace.

  Too many windows, he thinks angrily. Too many rooms from which the day’s faint heat has bled already. Night fell—an hour ago?

  Three hours?

  It doesn’t matter. He will secure the upper galleries and then shut himself in the library. His library! Beloved nucleus, smelling of tallow and camphor, stalagmite heaps of candles on the maple desk. He must hurry and get there, before he loses everything. Before fatigue and chill rob him of his gift, those galloping harmonies, the wild something in his blood.

  Then he stops, amazed. Why has the maid gone to bed, and the palace in such a state? Where is the porter? Did they seek his permission to retire?

  Irritated, he turns abruptly into the Paris room. Here as always he checks himself. The chamber is fragile, intimate: tables on does’ legs, bowls of lacquerwood and antique silver, a tea service set out for visitors who never come. Anton feels a trespasser here, even though the maid crosses the room day and night. Does she sense what he does—the trembling of a thousand crystal minnows in the chandelier, the narcotic murmur of the divans in their dust-shrouds, a room tossing in its sleep?

  He crosses gingerly to the far corner, where a stair curls tightly down to the maid’s chambers. He leans over the rail. No light whatsoever reaches his eyes from below.

  “Tatiana!”

  She is a long time answering, a mumbled acknowledgment that might be, “Your mercy.”

  “You ought to know to fasten the shutters, little mother, or do you want us all to freeze? And really, you haven’t left me so much as a warm coal. Come up now, we must see to the galleries at least.”

  She says nothing, and Anton waits a very long time for the first drag of her clubfoot over the granite floor. Her candle is barely visible, a salamander-shine in a dark pool.

  “It’s truly cold, Tatiana.” He does not know what else to say. He knocks against a tea table, turns with a scowl, rushes from the room.

  On the great stair his temples throb, his footsteps ring loud and individual. Yet another open window at the landing, where he pauses for breath. He snatches at the wind-whipped curtain, tugs it aside.

  Here is the west yard, scrubbed clean of straw and cigarettes by the gale, the fountain’s spray tossing far beyond its basin. Under the hay wagon, a lone gull shudders from foot to foot, looking as if it wishes to speak up against its circumstances. The flags on the parapet crack like whips.

  Granite frames this yard on three sides, but the last is a tall, solid hedge. Cutting through at its exact center is an arch of laurels: the path to the memorial gardens. Just inside the arch, grotesquely large, Charonic, face like a rhinoceros beetle, frowns Wagner. Further in, Strauss’s imperious arm rises over a sickly magnolia. It was the Magar’s idea: diversify the garden’s populace of marble kings and generals with statues of composers. Like the older figures, these are gigantic, fawning. Not one Romanian stands among them.

  Yet.

  Anton looks up. In the moonlight the distant Carpathians slash the sky in two: blue-black above, midnight down to the horizon. He must smile for lovely Bicazului Pass, the corset of ice that declares the ridgeline.

  But—where are the lights of Constanta?

  The city is dark.

  The entire plain is dark. A blackout.

  “Oh no.”

  He sees them, then: dull metal beads on a taut string, high over the plain. The gray wings are cruel, the bellies deep. He cannot hear the engines. Russians? Turks? He counts in a panic—ten, fourteen, eighteen—then fumbles and leaps up the last steps.

  In a Spartan room on the left, half hidden beneath scraps of his own wriggling shorthand, is the telegraph key. He is tapping before his other hand has even found the crank: wake up, wake up, Lupescu!

  Colonel Lupescu is a kind man, even when dragged from his bed, but now his response is curt.

  “Talk.”

  Anton taps: “Eighteen
maybe twenty aircraft capital blacked out heading north in file—”

  “Stand by.”

  The distant station is silent for some minutes; Anton waits in terror. Lupescu would be confirming the blackout with Bucharest or Constanta, or verifying the planes’ trajectory, or warning the army to the east. The rain begins, a soft hiss at the window.

  At last Lupescu responds. “Tchavodari Palace.”

  “Here!”

  “Anton?”

  “Sir!”

  “Anton, how are your studies progressing?”

  “Did not copy—”

  “I believe you were preparing for the conservatory.”

  Anton pulls back his hand, as though the key might snap at him. Lupescu cannot tap code at such speeds. No one can.

  “Anton.”

  He pounces on the key, taps like a lunatic: “Repeat unknown aircraft northbound—”

  “The viola, isn’t it?”

  “Constanta—”

  “I don’t think I ever told you I played the cello.”

  Anton touches nothing.

  “I was really quite accomplished in my twenties. I played in Sienna before the Lady Sofia di Bali Adro. She actually cried, at the end of Schumann’s Fourth.”

  Anton cannot transmit to any other station. He is miserably cold again.

  “Are you serious about music, Anton?”

  What to do? His hand gropes to the key. “Yes.”

  “That may be why I’ve never brought this up. For I’m exactly the same. Music was everything, absolutely everything I lived for. It’s purely accidental, a cruel joke really, that I ended up in the army. My grandfather gave me his own violin on my eighth birthday; I played it eleven years. But something in my wrist protested the violin. The angulation, is that a word, Anton? The angulation was all wrong. So very severe, violins. But when I picked up the cello I knew I was home.”

  He goes on. It truly is Lupescu; Anton knows his hesitations, misspellings, the twitch that makes half his r’s into d’s. He wants to scream for a witness, but who would come? Tatiana, the lame, the slow-witted? Was she even out of bed?

  “My masters presented me to their masters; I was universally adored. I rode to Venice on the Kaiser’s train, and played when he entertained the American ambassador. I was so happy, Anton! They paid me to do precisely what I loved! But one night changed it all.”

  Stop, thinks Anton. Please stop, Colonel. But he knows Lupescu won’t.

  “When are your trials?”

  “The ninth.”

  “Day of judgment! Ha! You must be ready for anything. My own—God knows I’d rather forget it—came right there, in your palace. When the Magar was new to power, his cruelty a rumor. We didn’t know what cruelty meant, we who guarded Constanta against ships that never attacked, watching Bucharest’s boys tramp off to the slaughter. But we gained an education that night.

  “All of us knew that the Magar was the one voice of power east of the mountains, that he could order the symphony dissolved, could even have us shot if he wished, but what does one do about that as a cello player? He was a dandy, too, our little tyrant, a great lover of the arts. Fresh from Paris, from those five exiled years, whoring and sobbing into crystal champagne, waiting for his star to rise. As it did.

  “We learned later that he had proposed to a young violinist, a student in the Sorbonne, and that she had not even rejected him, but simply told her butler not to accept his letters, not to let him in as far as the cloakroom. A great shame, a fiasco. Think of his rage—no troops at his service to storm that door. No view from his palace windows, no dance in the Summer Ballroom to tempt her. And every day the contempt of Parisians, certain the Danube delta was a Godforsaken land of grog halls and fever. As it is.

  “He ordered our performance in the Round Hall, and it had never been more beautifully decorated, Anton, with gardenias and roses from God knows where laced round the pillars, and yellow candles in the mezzanine. Three hundred chairs for the listeners. My parents sat in the second row, behind the dignitaries. Mother wore a lily in her hair—”

  Anton blinks. His mother?

  “Yes, she was already ill; in fact she only lived a few more weeks. But we could not dissuade her. She sat with her piccolo in her lap, beaming: she couldn’t play it any more, but believed the old thing’s presence would bring me luck. The next day she threw it from her window into the canal.

  “All were seated and smiling; we waited only on the Magar. But we waited long. A whisper raced the hall that he was taking tea, alone, in the Paris room. I’ve never known for sure.

  “But finally he came: in dress uniform. With no one on his arm. He bowed smartly to the audience, then turned and looked at us so long and coldly that we began to fidget in sheer nervousness. Our conductor held his little ivory baton as though it burned him. Finally, instead of taking his seat, our host walked to the east entrance, and leaned with crossed arms against those big, barnlike doors, shut as always against the noise of the yard. At last he gave our horror-stricken maestro a nod.

  “We played two movements of Beethoven’s Pastoral. Bold and bright and flattering. And we were perfect. The crowd whooped, almost too loudly. The Magar clapped as well, but his face was a chilly mask. We followed with Debussy’s Nocturnes, and for that we earned a meager smile. Then the soloist walked forward, slowly, into the hush before Ravel.

  “She was lovely, all of sixteen, vague Gypsy lines to her eyebrows. A prodigy. Our conductor pumped her arm like a hysteric; the Magar’s handshake was slow. Detaining her, he studied us once more, and this third look was positively mortal. He worshipped Ravel. We knew it, had known it for months, and right down to that pimpled pipsqueak with the silver triangle, we trembled at the thought of a bad performance. A clarinetist massaged his wrist, pouting voicelessly; the second violinist traced a cross—”

  Now Anton interrupts, convulsive. “Colonel Lupescu! I don’t want to know what happened. It has nothing to do with me!”

  “Ah, but consider, my insubordinate fellow: we were just two floors down from where you sit now—two floors, and nineteen years. Imagine it: the excruciating absence of sound, of breath. The conductor with sweat in his eyes. His baton darts. And oh, the music! Begun awry! Whose was the sour voice? There’s a shuffle of bending backs. Everyone leans steeply into the work, a ferocious concentration takes us all. And the sourness disappears. We sail smoothly over large waves, ride them out, each grace note cut like a dream. My mother sways; the Magar closes his eyes. Ravel is a full-billowed sail.

  “Then, suddenly, that little worm of poison again. His eyes snap open. It’s in the woodwinds, I think, and dare a glance. There he is—that blubbering clarinetist! He has ceased playing, is squeezing his wrist in agony; he is having some sort of attack! And then the buffoon leaps up, red-faced, lurching from his row—”

  “Stop!” Anton’s hand is shaking.

  “And the white-haired French horn player gapes at him and catches his sleeve, and the clarinetist shoves him back against the musicians behind, and the loving audience convulses in a shout of dismay—”

  “I am leaving, Colonel!”

  “And the soloist turns her back to the audience, hoping someone will shoot her. And my mother rises from her own chair, haggard, clutching the piccolo in her big arthritic hands, and groaning for breath. The conductor thrashes out the lost tempo with insane animation, and then. Anton. The final, unbearable train wreck of the strings! And the Magar—”

  “Be quiet!” screams Anton, backing to the door.

  “—the Magar has waited for this. He barks a command, and we are suddenly surrounded by dozens of guards, men with naked bayonets; they just swarm in like fleas and drive the audience out. And the Magar throws open the door to the west yard, and in rush, I swear before God, dozens and dozens of swine—”

  “No! No! No!”

  “—huge hogs from that Posnr fellow—”

  “Christ!”

  “—men behind with German shepherds, and they
are so horrified, filthy, shoving, pissing, squealing…”

  “Bastard! Liar!”

  Anton turns and runs. His one thought is that if he hears any more, he will rip the telegraph from its wiring, smash it, and later be called a saboteur. I can still think practically, he tells himself, on the verge of another scream. Lupescu. Pigs. Why such horrible nonsense?

  The hallway bucks under his feet. His breastbone resonates with the storm. He gropes for reason, like a life vest he might yet slip into, but all he can think of is that gentle Lupescu has been a long, long time alone.

  The Summer Ballroom is awash with rain: staghorn ferns weep it from high chains on the balconies; skylights thrash it upon the dance floor. Anton stands in the doorway, slowing his breath. A famous room, this, where princes and later prime ministers and dictators waltzed their wives or lovers. He tries to see them, the unapproachable ones: prim, powdered, a night in every respect opposite this one; a blushing cheek, a sextet—

  He kicks away the doorstop. No heating this room.

  But then, over the storm: footsteps. Someone has ducked into the dressing chambers.

  “Faraz?”

  In the wet moonlight, nothing. But quick footfalls echo in the rooms beyond. Anton lifts his torch, dashes through the spray, cursing. It can only be Faraz, the Shiite porter; abandoning his post to nose about the Magar’s rooms, perhaps make off with something. No one else is inside the palace gate, save lumbering Tatiana.

  Anton bursts into the master dressing room, finds it untouched. But sounds tease from a room adjoining: left, right? No, behind him, the bathchambers. Water splashing into the tub! Anton leaps for the door, but hears the bolt slide home even as he pushes.

  “Have you gone mad, Faraz?” Anton hurries to the other door. Also locked. He beats furiously. The splashing stops.

  Now the footsteps approach his door. Knuckles rap from inside, once.

  “It is for you.”

  “The bath? For me?”

  “Don’t you want to be clean?” The voice is distinctly mocking.

  “Who’s there?” Anton cries. “Faraz?”