Unfettered

by Terry Brooks

  “You don’t know me?”

  “I don’t know if I know you! But no one is to run a bath without my express permission! No one is to do anything without my permission while our Commander is afield! And if it is you, Faraz, I will have you in stocks, like a common deserter, for leaving your post. Do you realize—”

  “Call me a deserter.” The other speaks with slow contempt.

  “Let me in! I order you!”

  The footsteps retreat.

  “Come. I unlocked the door while you were bellowing.”

  He has indeed. But as Anton swings the door open, the other—the door on the opposite wall—crashes shut. Anton runs through the steamy chamber, grabs at the knob, pushes.

  It will not budge. A foot is against it.

  Anton throws his whole weight against this door, but his whole weight amounts to little. The owner of the planted foot snickers.

  “Go on, laugh. You won’t be laughing long.”

  The other obliges, laughs louder. Anton is ready to explode. But with a tremendous effort he does not. He dislikes hysteria, really. And he is on duty.

  “Faraz, listen. I’m not angry. But you’ve got to take a message to town. We’re under attack!”

  “No one ordered me to run you a bath.”

  “What?”

  “I said no one made me to do it. You might show some appreciation.”

  “What?”

  “It wasn’t easy getting that boiler lit. I did it because you were freezing to death.”

  Anton looks over his shoulder. The great claw-footed tub squats under billowing steam.

  “I am so very cold.” Anton nearly whispers, his shoulder still pressed to the door.

  “We might pull you through—one hears of such things—if only you would cooperate. But I see you won’t. Out in the storm with me, is it? Very well. The servant obeys.”

  He had no idea Faraz possessed such Romanian.

  “I’m off. Don’t you dare waste that water.”

  The master obeys, backs slowly to the tub, but—disaster! Faraz has pulled the plug. Less than an inch of water left. With thoughtless need, he plunges his free hand into the water. The voice outside erupts in laughter. Boots clatter down the service stair.

  “Faraz!”

  The pantry door slams.

  “You bastard Persian!”

  Hot water teases his fingers. Gone.

  Anton will send a message by the tower lamp. Risky—but he can neither ignore the aircraft nor go to town himself, leaving the palace in the hands of a cripple and a lunatic porter. He rushes back through the rainy ballroom. Down the windy corridor. Under the oilpaint smirks of deposed kings, freezing to death.

  Lupescu’s code still perforates the night:

  “…insane, don’t you see, he’s crazed by power, his hideous power!”

  On the great stair landing, Anton leans from the window again. The rain surges in like a cold sneeze, almost extinguishing his torch, and he backs away.

  “Sweet Mary and Joseph. I’m drenched.”

  “Beware of him!” taps Lupescu.

  He turns the corner, running again. There would be a drybox and matches in the tower, in fact—

  “Oh, the tower!” For the second time that night, he shouts in joy and triumph. The tower’s huge signal lamp, it burns hot. Incredible that he has forgotten. But then he has not used the lamp for—six months?

  A year?

  He shivers up an iron staircase, six dizzying turns, and then his torch thumps on the padlocked tower door. He groans, feels his pockets.

  Below, the drag of Tatiana’s foot on the great stair. Her voice wavering about a melody. She enjoys the stairwell’s echo, the choral embrace it affords even the meanest voice. Suddenly, for no reason he can fathom, he wishes urgently to avoid her.

  The key. He had quite forgotten it was in his pocket. It fits, but what now? The lock is rusted, fused. Tatiana labors up another step, singing:

  And if you treat him as your only son,

  He’ll cheat you ’ere the day is done

  And if you tender him his liberty

  Then far beyond your call he’ll be

  Oh, far beyond your call he’ll run

  And you with harvest scarce begun.

  Halfwit. Singing to the gale. And how she tortures him with that ballad. Days, weeks, until it flits about in his head like a thrush in a chimney.

  O bitter coin of liberty

  For far beyond your call he’ll be.

  Her candle glimmers on the wall. With a gasp, he wrenches open the lock. In a moment he has struggled into the hollow tower. The door booms shut, and Anton follows the sound up a thin ladder. Cold rungs bite his fingers; oil splatters from his torch, which he clamps awkwardly between two fingers; the climb seems endless. But at last he thrusts open the ceiling door, dangles horribly in the air a moment, and pulls himself through.

  It is like wriggling into heaven. The chamber is nearly all glass, and it is the highest point between Mount Amagire and the sea. He is between rain clouds again. Like knots of fireflies, electric storms ripple to the horizon, illuminating icy Bicazului, splashing brilliance in the troughs between slithering breakers. The capital is still dark, and even the lights of the village—his own village—are dim. But strangely, in other places his vision extends for miles: he sees stubbled wheat fields, smudges of forest, ruins.

  A low fog, he reasons. Snagged on church spires, wedged into alleys. For his village creeps almost to the palace wall, spends mornings in its shadow. Anton remembers this view, reversed: all the long years he trundled to school, or wheeled sawdust from the lumber mill, or eased great butterfly-winged piano cases from his father’s shop into waiting trucks—always, this tower loomed over his life. Each morning until that one on which he left for the municipal music school (certain those meager, mouse-dung halls were no more than a turnstile in his path to the Conservatory) he had craned his neck up to see the first sun dancing here, on this high glass pulpit.

  “Posies for the mayor, poppies for the king,” his sister Julita would sing, cavorting, gripping his finger. “Violets for the merchant-man with his golden ring.” She waved to the soldiers above, and very rarely, they waved back. Then she would squeal with delight. She loved the tower, had no sense that generals rather than kings ruled Romania today, or of the difference between them.

  Julita down there below. Grown up now, almost a woman. Invisible in the fog. He gulps down a sudden virulent melancholy. To be at his mother’s table, sipping coffee sweet as molasses, watching his father chew a pipe. To dance with his sister again.

  But even as he watches, the moon leaps free of a cloud, emerges round and huge, fixing the land below like a squint animal eye. Everything is abruptly visible: each street of his town, every branch in the thatched roofs. The listing Posnr mansion squats on the next ridge, over a slum of groggy stables. But the windows do not shine. Nothing shines, everything merely appears in the submarine light, shipwrecks at forty fathoms.

  The fleet of aircraft hangs in the south sky, dwindling.

  A noise: his skin crawls. The mad baying of the dogs, seeking a harmony quite impossible to so grotesque a team—but distinctly hungry. Has Faraz forgotten them?

  Anton turns away from the view. Now then.

  Exactly in the room’s center stands the signal lamp, exquisite and huge. Its concave mirror is larger than a half-barrel; its mantel of spun asbestos like a fetal star. Anton raps the fuel tank: half full. Now he twists opens the valve and pumps vigorously, bringing the fuel to pressure. Then he touches his torch to the mantle.

  The flash quite blinds him; flames singe the hair up and down his arm. He smiles, finds a socket for his torch, and steps directly in front of the mirror.

  Heat!

  It bathes his face, his chest, his limbs. His wet hair streams. He shields his eyes with a raised arm. Only now does he realizes how thoroughly cold he has become.

  I’ll never move again.

  But the heat bit
es at the scratch on his wrist. Annoyed, he turns his back, stares at the small, irregular wound. He cannot remember where the damn thing came from.

  No one responds to his lamp signal. Hardly surprising. Anton has begun to suspect an immense drill, and his part in it a test of readiness. Well, he would damn well pass. But what would they do to Lupescu?

  He rolls the lamp about, inspects the world at leisure, standing so close to the flame that his chest burns through his shirt, loving it. The tide has risen over the cleft in the sea rocks, but it is still there, leviathan-like beneath the waves, troubling their charge. And from this height he sees the whole garden and its stone residents, beyond Wagner’s gate: twisted Paganini, and scarecrow Prokofiev spindled between a pair of unhealthy lilacs. Farther back, yellow eyes glisten from a row of cages, mouths hang open. The dogs are watching him, like prisoners waiting to riot, tense with idiot hate.

  They howl. Let them howl. Hot, hot to the edge of pain, Anton smiles over his country, his palace, his lovely Black Sea—and then he sees the girl, and shrieks aloud.

  She is standing on an iceberg, making swiftly toward the palace over the waves: a young girl, with ice crystals in her hair like white jewels, and her colorless eyes brighter than these. She is regal and coldly smiling, her arms are bare and slender. He lunges for binoculars: she wears a robe of frozen teardrops, frozen baby’s breath, frozen eighth notes. He thinks, Something is going to happen to me.

  When she draws near the cliff, the clouds roll solemnly back, and one leaps rippling down to become a white stairway from her feet to the window of the tower. She starts to glide up to him, effortless, and her voice precedes her in a velvet singsong. He has never heard a thing so beautiful.

  Anton touches his lamp. Its heat is distant.

  She is almost to him, a girl in full flower—but her skin is the blue-white of the iceberg. Her hand is on the window. He has not unlatched it.

  She pauses, and then a new, kinder smile plays on her lips. They shape two words:

  Don’t wait.

  Her breath paints ice crystals on the glass.

  Still, he does not move. He is scared out of his mind. But the beautiful girl only watches him with greater compassion. She knows everything about him. She is for him. She is the Empress of Antarctica’s daughter.

  When she breathes out, the patch of ice widens, hiding her face. But then her finger taps, and ice and glass shatter together in a cough of wind. Her blue hand reaches in and touches the latch. Halfheartedly, he moves to stop her. She flicks his arm away; it is done.

  Inside the chamber her smile is more than kind. He has expected her all his life. She drops her glistening robe, reaches beneath his shirt with both spreading hands, and for a moment he feels an unbearable sweet flame as her sapphirine body presses his own.

  Then he thrashes. He is sprawled over the chair, head thrown back. The window is closed, the lamp has gone out, he is bathed in a sweat turning rapidly cold. He sits up—and the world spins black. Sand and grime bite his cheek. He is suddenly on the floor.

  Fumes, from the lamp! Retching, he pulls himself to his feet, throws open the window, gasps and gasps and gasps.

  He has nearly been asphyxiated! And the girl?

  No girl. No iceberg. Hallucination. And yet she tried to kill him.

  Kill him? By opening the window?

  Save him?

  The Magar has a bathrobe famous throughout Europe: a gift to his grandfather from Catherine of Russia, it is sewn entirely from the pelts of the pepper-brown coyotes of Tajikistan. Anton has never allowed himself to so much as stroke it. Now, down in the library, he tightens its sash, arranges its sumptuous collar. He tells himself that his commander owes him this much—a little comfort on a freakish night, a few hours rescued for music.

  “And I don’t care if you like it, you son of a toothless bitch.”

  In fact he would gladly stay here for days: the innermost chamber of the palace, the safest, the driest. The warmest place, too (except for the white umbra of the tower lamp, where he no longer wishes to be). No bust on the mantle, no frowning eyes. One tight door. One shuttered window, a mere slot really, through which for untold ages the librarian-priest dispensed scrolls, sermons, obituaries bound in scarlet wax.

  He warms his hands on the valiant candles, cracks his knuckles, picks up his viola and bow. He makes a slow first draw.

  There. The sound, the embrace of pure joy.

  He moves without haste into his music. Playing in a trance, barely glancing at the manuscript. It swells, soft étude to deeper forte, a small boat borne with confident strokes to a deepening ocean. The other strings, the woodwinds, the brass are with him, he hears them all. Deep beneath the spell of the music, he smiles, dances, shouts. It is what he has waited for. They will come to their feet, they will pour him glasses of sherry. They will cheer him into his conservatory rooms.

  For Anton knows that he has never played such a wonder of music; that it bespeaks, he will not fool himself, a destiny. For this his haste, for this his suffering—and now he leaps beyond the last scribbled bars, sails on through untroubled skies. He pauses, holding in an ocean of breath, to jot a phrase—

  The candles cringe, spit a palsy of wax on his hands. Wind moans in the shuttered slot.

  “God damn it! This heap of stone is drafty as a sty! What?”

  For he thinks he hears a tongue click, a mouth he knows making sounds of disapproval beyond the window.

  “Father?”

  Silence.

  He pulls his score back from the candles, takes one of them, steps from the library to the hall. “Dad! Is that you?”

  There is no one at the slot.

  He sighs. He has wrestled down every window, tied every curtain, closed the chimney flues. This obstinate draft, it should not be. And then he knows. The Round Hall.

  Yes: the wind comes from that way. And Faraz has to have gone somewhere.

  He does not want to visit that room, bearing the chalice of his unfinished sonata.

  His candle dies. He swears again.

  The circular performance hall is empty. Dusty candles cling to the mezzanine; brown vines rooted in cracked earthenware grip the pillars. A few chairs jumble in the corners.

  As he guessed: the huge wooden doors stand open. Above them, rapine, an old wolf’s head. The jaws gape, the discolored tongue cleaves to a leathery palette. Anton imagines the Magar, young, strong, with a younger violence in him, standing below this animal with a fragile Gypsy girl, holding her hand. He lays his own upon the doors.

  The smell of the farmyard, through the space between: methane, manure, rotten straw. Sounds, too: a snuffle, a porcine grunt.

  Nineteen years, and he still keeps pigs. Lupescu’s tale crowds his thoughts. I hate pigs, all pigs, everywhere, Anton thinks. I hate them. He slams the doors with a boom. Beyond, a sudden hysterical squealing.

  He has to relight all the candles. He flexes his arms, still uneasy, but soon the walls armored with books, the dozen sentinels over his jotted score, relax him. He plays serene and strong, writes a few notes, plays on. Deep shivers, but this time only of delight. He is Anton Cuza of Romania. There will be cheers, lovers, invitations, busts.

  At the window slot, very softly, a voice coughs, “No.”

  “Who is it?” shouts Anton. “Dad!”

  More coughs. “Too florid, too bravo. Do you want to be known for melodrama?”

  Anton fairly sprints to the window. But whoever is there has drawn to one side, so that only his breath can be seen, puffing white.

  “You let me down, Anton.” The voice is soft, soft. He is almost sure it is his father’s.

  “Why? How?”

  “Tch, as if it needed telling. You don’t even know me any more, do you? You’ve quit your family, your friends, your home. Chasing a dream of vanity.”

  “I know you—Dad.” Anton stutters, wants to reach through the slot but is afraid.

  “You don’t. And your mother? And Julita? Ten months witho
ut a visit, without a letter. And have no doubt: they knew what they had been traded for. They saw them—painted women looking you over from the train windows, men in black finery in the dining car.”

  “How did you get in here? What on earth did you say to Faraz?”

  “Do you give a thought to them now? Do you remember the house of your birth at all?”

  “Of course I do. What, have you come all this way to accuse me of that?” Anton squeezes out a laugh. “I remember everything. Our morning coffee, Mother’s sweetbreads, you in your woodshop, throwing hammers at the rat. It is you. Why don’t you come around to the door?”

  The other says nothing. His white breath withdraws a bit.

  “I remember the wooden blocks you carved, for me and for Julita.”

  A faint snort.

  “You never could stand to be wrong, Dad. But you are, you see. I’ll remember as much as you want.” Anton is crowing, no longer bending to the slot. “I remember Julita at her sixteenth birthday, the calico dress, the necklace we chose. She was the kindest, loveliest, gentlest—I remember her dancing with me, and with Enri and Zoltan from next door, while you jigged those songs on your fiddle, the only three you know. Posies and poppies. I remember her chattering about France, wanting everything French, dreaming of a trip to Provence, a ferry down the Rhône.”

  “It is you who dream.”

  “I remember my sister—”

  “You read it.”

  “No, no. I lived it.”

  “You imagined living it. You read something similar.”

  Anton checks himself. The old man was in the foulest of moods. There was no contradicting his claims, no matter how ridiculous, when such waves of despair and contempt took hold. One could only wait, or leave.

  Another cough. “You are pathetic, my son. If indeed I should call you that today. You ran from us.”

  “I went to school.”

  “You fled. Your mother had been ill. I had not sold a table in a month, a piano in five.”

  “It was a clammy place. My chest hurt and my nose ran.”