The Eyes of a King

by Catherine Banner

  These are the last words I will write. “Tell me everything from the beginning,” you said. “Explain to me why you did it.” I have. There is nothing left to tell you anymore.

  The dust drifts across the paving of the silent balcony. A dark wind—the first wind of autumn—rifles through the pages and draws the stars behind it into the fading sky. Light and laughter are rising from the rooms far below; still farther below that, the lights of the city are emerging in the settling darkness. When you were here, half an hour ago, you lit a lamp for me. The breeze makes it waver now and turns the pages back to the beginning. This book is the past five years of my life. How can I close it now?

  I do not have the strength to go down into the noise and the light of the party. So I turn the pages of the book instead, tracing the words I wrote. There are parts of this story that still haunt my dreams, that repeat themselves in all my waking thoughts and refuse to let go. But I did not begin by writing about those things.

  I began with the book, and the snow.

  The snow began to fall as I walked home. It was dark, though barely five o’clock, and cold. My breath billowed white in the darkness and everything was quiet. Even the jangle and thud of the soldiers’ horses seemed deadened. The flakes were so cold that they almost burned where they touched my face, and they lodged on my clothes and stuck fast. I tried to brush them away and pulled my coat up tighter about my neck.

  I was used to snow—we all were—but not at the end of May. It looked set to stay cold for at least a week. We got more than enough snow in the winter.

  There was a sort of beauty in it, I suppose. The clouds had closed like a lid over the narrow squares of sky, and already the gas lamps were lit. The snow caked on their panes and glowed yellow. I stopped still, and then it was almost completely silent, without even the wet crunch of my footsteps. Quiet, not silent. Through the still air I could hear the feathery sound of the snowflakes settling.

  I looked up into the sky. The way the snowflakes swelled in toward my face made me feel as if I was rising. It got darker. It got colder.

  I started to think about going home, but I didn’t.

  I began to shiver, but I went on staring into the sky. It got still darker. I would have stood there all night, perhaps. It was like an enchantment. And I did not want to go home yet anyway. The constant frantic motion of the snowflakes made me dizzy, and my neck ached from looking upward. Still the snow fell. I was hypnotized.

  Suddenly I felt someone was near to me. The spell was broken. I was back in the street again.

  I looked around, but there was no one. Only a presence in the air, as if someone was hiding in the shadows. I felt sick suddenly. There were ghosts here perhaps, invisible spirits moving close by. I turned away.

  Before I had taken three steps, my foot met with something heavy and I stumbled. There was a black shape in the snow, spotted with the flakes my feet had thrown up. At first I thought it was a dead animal—a rat perhaps—lying there frozen.

  I bent closer. And I saw that it was not an animal at all but a book. Just a book. I reached out toward it cautiously. I could still feel a strange presence—someone else’s thoughts like a vapor in the air.

  I willed the book’s cover to lift itself, with the slightest tensing of my fingers and my mind. It didn’t stir. That was a trick I’d known for years, and it usually worked. Although it was only a cheap trick, no more. It did not even work on the Bible.

  I was suspicious of the book. I did not know if I should touch it. Perhaps it would be better to leave it where it was. I turned to walk away. But I could not. I was going to pick it up; I knew I was. It was unavoidable. There was no point in reasoning with myself, then.

  My fingers drew close to the dark leather of the cover even before I had decided. I watched them hover above it for a moment, as if they were someone else’s. I tried to pull my hand away. I couldn’t. For a second I was frightened. Then my fingers closed around the book, and at the same moment the presence vanished. I picked the book up and flipped the cover open.

  The pages were stiff and suntanned yellow, like sheets of bone. The first one was blank. I turned to the next. Nothing. The next one and the next one too were empty. I fanned the pages out loose, impatiently, bending the covers back almost to breaking point, so that the dry glue in the spine bristled. They were all blank.

  The weather had changed while I had looked away. The wind growled through the narrow streets, the pitch of its voice heightening. The snowflakes dashed at my face like ground glass. My jaw ached with cold, and my fingers on the book’s cover were raw and wet from the melting snow. I pushed the book into my coat pocket and set off for home.

  Later, when I held the book to the light of the oil lamp in the bedroom, I wondered if I should have left it where it was. There was a strangeness about it that made me uneasy. I had been sure that there was someone behind me in the street, and I could not help connecting the book with that presence. Perhaps it was a stupid thing to think. It was only an empty book.

  I turned away from the lamp and pressed the side of my face against the window to create a shadow that I could see out of. The wind had rent a hole in the snow clouds, and a few stars shone through. I liked looking at the stars. One of them was called Leo, but I did not know which one. I never knew which one. The snow was freezing hard in the streets. It caught every faint glimmer from the gas lamps and reflected it ice blue. Tomorrow would be cold—very cold.

  A sound made me turn back to the room. “Leo!” came my grandmother’s voice sharply. I pushed the book across the floor, into the darkness under my bed, and sat back on the windowsill. “Leo!” my grandmother said again, and she stepped into the room. She looked at Stirling, asleep in his bed in the far corner. Then she turned to me. “Leo, do you need that light?” Her eyebrows lowered, casting her eyes into shadow, like a skeleton’s. “Put it out!” she told me. “You’re wasting oil. What are you doing?”

  “I was going to go to bed.”

  “Aye. It’s late.”

  She gazed at me for a moment. She looked so old in the shadows, though she was only sixty-five. Her gray hair shone, tight across her head, and the loose wisps about her ears caught the light of the lamp. The lines around her eyes and mouth were pronounced, and her face was tense. Her face was always tense when she spoke to me.

  “You were kept after school again?” she said. “Leo, I am losing count of how many times this month.”

  I did not answer. She looked at me for a long time without speaking. “What is it?” I said eventually.

  I expected her to continue nagging me. But instead, she looked away and said, “You have grown so like Harold. His eyes were gray too when he was your age. That was what I was thinking.”

  “Grandmother?” I said, and stood up.

  She turned back to me. “What?”

  I changed my mind. “Nothing.”

  “Good night, Leo,” she said sadly. “God bless you.”

  She looked as if she might reach up and put her hand on my shoulder, then seemed to decide against it. She left, and closed the door behind her. I heard the door of her own room rattle shut. It needed fixing. The screws were rusting, and one of the hinges had snapped. I would have done it. That door was going to fall soon. But it was hard to get hinges these days, when the factories only made bullets.

  I waited for a moment before kneeling and reaching under my bed for the book. I felt a corner and caught hold of it. But what I pulled out was a different book altogether. Larger, and older. I blew the dust off the cover, as quietly as I could, and it prickled in my nose. This had surely been there a long time.

  Then I remembered what it was. It was years since I had put it there. My grandmother would have gone crazy if she’
d known I still had a copy.

  The Golden Reign by Harold North. A hardback book, leather. It was a bestseller. Hundreds of thousands of people read that book. Then it was banned. They burned the entire second print run. My father was already far away. It was strange that my grandmother had just mentioned him, and now here was his forgotten book in my hand.

  I ran my fingers over the cover. He was the best, my father, the best writer of our time. But seven years had passed now and I hardly remembered his face. I had been eight then, Stirling’s age. Perhaps my father would not have known me either.

  The cover peeled away from the title page reluctantly. Underneath the printed title my father’s signature still stood out in yellowing writing. I remember he autographed it for me, because I asked him to. I said I wanted to be a writer, like him.

  I slammed the cover down hard, pushed the book back under my bed, and turned to blow out the oil lamp. But I didn’t have to. The oil was finished. The lamp flickered once … twice … and went out.

  The next morning I woke to cold white dawn. White, not gray, because of the strange light of the snow. That was what I saw when I opened my eyes—the snow in the street, like pure white waves frozen in a channel, and above the dirty houses snow hanging heavily in the sky. Then I remembered that I couldn’t see the street from my bed. Every morning, when I woke, I saw only the sky. But I was looking down into the street now.

  I was sitting on the windowsill. My head was pressed hard against the freezing window, and it hurt to pull away. Why was I here? I remembered going to bed the night before, after the lamp had gone out. I stood up.

  The book was lying on the windowsill, beside the stone-cold lamp. That book I had found in the snow. It was strange, because I was sure that I had left it under my bed, where I’d shoved it carelessly the evening before. I picked it up and fanned out the pages absentmindedly, blinking. It was early, and I was tired. It could not have been much later than six o’clock. Then I started. There was writing in the book!

  I snapped the book shut. It had been empty the day before; I had checked every page. I opened it again. Yes, there was writing. Close-packed black writing that I did not recognize. Surely then, the book was more than what it seemed. It could only be evil. I put it quickly back on the windowsill, afraid to keep hold of it. I stared at it for a long while.

  I knew that I was going to read it. I wanted to find out what the writing said. Perhaps I had been stupid to be afraid; a book could not harm me. I tried to open it again with my willpower. I concentrated my mind on it as hard as I could. My brain ached from the effort, but it didn’t work. The book stayed shut. I considered it for a moment, then snatched it up and opened it.

  There were several blank pages. I turned to the beginning of the writing and started to read.

  As the first sunlight drove out the bleak gray dawn, it glowed through the curtains of the hospital room. The young man opened them quietly and looked out. He watched the light cross the railway lines and spread over the roofs of the square gray houses. It transformed the ragged weeds on the siding into clear purple flowers standing motionless in the silence of the morning. The tears were running down his face, but he stayed there at the window until they were gone. A train passed and faded again. He thought of the people just waking in the houses, and the people on that train, who thought this was an ordinary day, when the sun had risen so differently to him.

  The young woman called his name. He turned and went to her, and laid one hand upon the baby’s head. She did not wake. He took the woman’s hand. His eyes fixed on her for a moment, though she did not see it. Her blond ringlets fell onto the baby’s face as she held her, and she looked out the window, across the deserted tracks, to a broken fence where birds hopped and sang. They could not be heard through the glass, and the baby slept. The sunlight spread into the room and turned everything to gold.

  A long time passed before the silence was broken. A middle-aged woman hurried in. She looked at the sleeping baby and began to cry herself and then laugh, and the younger woman was laughing too and hugging her mother. The baby’s grandmother took something from around her neck. It was a gold chain with a heavy charm on it—a jeweled bird that caught the sun now and sent spots of light flying around the small white room. The baby opened her eyes suddenly, though it must have been chance. “Your necklace, Mam,” said the young woman.

  “I will give it to her now,” said the older woman. “I will give this to my granddaughter.” She handed it to the baby’s father. “Keep it for when she’s older. One jewel is missing, but it always has been.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” said the young woman. “Let her wear it now, Mam, just for a minute.” Her husband fastened the clasp around the baby’s neck and straightened the chain. The jewel came down almost to her waist, she was so small. In silence, they looked at the baby.

  “I can tell already that she is going to be beautiful,” said the baby’s grandmother.

  “I wish I could live to see her grow up,” said the man, and he kissed the baby’s face. A tear dropped from his eye onto her cheek, and she began to cry then too.

  Far away in a lofty stone room, another baby was sleeping. His mother leaned over, pushing aside the velvet curtain of the bed, to watch him. Her husband had the baby in his arms while the priest spoke a blessing over the child. “Protect this prince and let him grow in wisdom,” the priest was saying, making the sign of the cross, but the king was not listening. His eyes were on his wife’s. The early sunlight reflected scarlet off her face, and her tiredness and that light made her look younger even than she was. The king tried to trace her face and his own in the child’s, then stopped because it made the tears rise in his eyes. He was not yet eighteen and she was younger, and he felt like a boy now, with this baby in his arms.

  Not long after the priest had gone, the baby woke. The king put him back into the queen’s arms carefully and knelt beside her, and they looked down at him in silence. Already his eyes were strange—large and dark, with an unusual strength for one so small. The eyes of a king, the people would say later. An odd stillness hung over the room as they watched the baby. He did not even cry. “What will this boy’s future be?” said the king, thinking of his own life.

  “I have you, and now a son,” said the queen, brushing the tears off her face. “If we are always like we are now, if we always stay together, I will never ask for more than this the rest of my life.”

  Five years passed and they were always together. And that last evening, the three of them were on the highest balcony of the castle when the queen heard shouts and turned to look down into the city. The prince and his father were fencing with wooden swords behind her. “What is it?” said the king, glancing at his wife.

  “I cannot see.” She turned back to them. “Go on with your match.”

  The king dropped the sword to his side and smiled. “I do not think I should be playing games like this.” But he handled the toy as if it was a real weapon. The queen smiled too, to see that.

  The prince, catching his father off his guard, knocked the sword out of his hand. They all laughed then, and the king lifted his son and swung him into his arms. “He would make a fine soldier,” said the queen.

  “Do not talk of that now,” said the king, stroking the child’s hair. “He’s still a little boy.”

  Birds settled in the trees of the roof garden below. The sun was setting bloodred. They watched it in silence, standing together like any family anywhere. Then it was no longer silent; close by, people were shouting.

  The castle gate fell with a loud explosion. Suddenly on their knees, the king and the queen stared at each other. “Don’t move,” the man told his son. Rebel troops were shouting below. Over the edge of the balcony, the boy could see them swarming into the castle yard like ants. The family clung together. The king drew a knife from his belt and it glinted red in the sunset. There was a sudden burst of gunshots in a room below. “They have guns,” the man breathed into his wife’s ear. “The
y have guns; is this possible? Who has been making guns?” She caught his hand; the small click of their two rings touching was harsh in the quiet.

  Heavy footsteps were coming closer below the balcony door. The king stood up, and the queen followed. His eyes never leaving the door, the prince clutched at his mother’s hand and found it. She moved between him and the doorway. The footsteps came closer.

  The door shot open, the king ran forward, and two gunshots echoed suddenly around the towers and rooftops of the palace. The knife fell from the king’s hand and clattered to the ground, and the king and the queen landed hard on the stone of the balcony. No one had resisted the attack. It had been too sudden.

  There was silence. One minute the man and the woman had been living; the next they were not. The blood crept quietly over the stone, and no one moved.

  The prince’s tears stuck in his throat, and he picked up the knife and threw it at the soldier who had shot. It sliced into his eye and the side of his face and stuck there for a moment. The man dropped the pistol and fell to his knees, his hands clasped to his face. Blood spilled between his fingers, thick and dark, and spattered onto the stone. Another soldier raised his gun. “No!” cried the injured one, his hands still over his face. “Remember the prophecy! Do not kill the prince!”

  They were on their way home. The girl—now five years old—and her grandmother. The radio was playing and the woman sang a few lines and turned it up louder. The little girl waved her arms like a dancer. Her grandmother laughed. “You’ll be dancing on a stage one day.”

  “I hope I will, if I practice hard,” said the girl, so earnestly that her grandmother laughed again. The bird charm still hung around the girl’s neck, and her eyes had sharpened to a bright blue now—the same blue as the jewel in the center of the necklace, as though it had been made for her.

  The lines of traffic moved fast. On the other side of the road, the cars stood in long queues, crammed close to each other. The girl began to doze in the evening light, rocking with every slight turn. Sandy shells and pebbles clattered on the dashboard. The woman reached across and touched her granddaughter’s cheek as she slept.