The Eyes of a King

by Catherine Banner

  Then I realized what I had done. I started laughing, feeling the fear rise like a prickling current in the air from the house that I had left. I laughed and laughed, falling down on my knees in the street. Men passed me, staring, but I could not see them properly.

  When I opened my watering eyes, the sergeant’s voice came quickly behind me. “Don’t move.” I tried to turn anyway, but he fired a shot. “The next will be in your head, so stay still if you value your life.” I didn’t value my life, or I never would have tried to shoot him. But there is something frightening about a gunshot, something that makes you freeze automatically. He stepped forward and kicked the pistol from my hand. I did not even try to catch it as it fell.

  “Pick up the gun,” the voice in my head was shouting. But I couldn’t. It looked like a dead insect lying there on the ground, with its shining black barrel and the crisscrosses on the butt, like a fly’s wing case.

  “Stay where you are,” said the sergeant. He was tying up my hands. I tried to turn. “Don’t move,” he told me warningly, and pressed the gun to my back as he pulled the knot tight about my wrists. “Stand up,” he told me then. I did it.

  Footsteps were approaching behind us. “What’s going on here?” It was the private.

  “He tried to shoot me,” muttered the sergeant. The private laughed incredulously. “It is not a joke.” The sergeant bent and looked into my face. “You will be in prison for this. You do understand that? You will be imprisoned for this crime.”

  I did not answer. I had heard about the military prison in Ositha.

  “Perhaps you are being too hard on him, sir,” said the private. “Perhaps he did not mean to shoot. He is probably still in shock. I was surprised you brought him at all.”

  “In shock?” said the sergeant.

  “You know,” the private said, lowering his voice. “After what happened with his brother.”

  “What did happen with his brother? Because this boy has not told me.”

  There was a silence between them. I looked at the floor. Then the private was explaining.

  “Hey, don’t cry,” he said, turning to me. My nose was running, but I couldn’t do anything about it because my hands were tied. “He should be with his family,” said the private. “This is a misunderstanding, and I am partly to blame.”

  The sergeant forced me to meet his eyes. “You should have told me,” he said. “I wouldn’t have made you come if you’d told me.”

  I looked away. They went on arguing, but I did not listen. Then the sergeant was speaking again with his face close to mine. “Listen. Whatever the circumstances, you are guilty of attempted murder. That is final. I’m sorry.”

  I did not know what that meant. I sat down on the floor and closed my eyes. “Watch him,” he told the private quietly, and went to get the other boys ready to leave for the border. The boy with the silver tooth was still complaining that I had taken his gun, but the sergeant ignored him.

  It was then I realized that the pistol was still lying at my feet. I opened my eyes.

  The sergeant was inside the small house, with his back to me. I glanced at the private. He was sitting on the doorstep of one of the deserted houses, studying his clasped hands. I wondered if he was paralyzed with guilt because he had forgotten to tell the sergeant about what had happened, or if he was thinking of something else entirely. I moved slightly. He did not look up. And then I decided to escape and get back to Kalitzstad. And the weight lifted from my heart.

  I was remembering a trick I used to practice when I was a little boy. I clenched my fists and imagined the ropes dissolving from around my wrists. I concentrated so hard that for a moment I could not see. The knots loosened. I went on forcing them outward. I stopped thinking of anything but getting my hands free. I could move my wrists now. I stopped and breathed again.

  But once I had stopped, I felt suddenly as if I would fall. I remembered that Stirling was dead. I was so frightened of falling into Nothing. I told myself that if I got back to Kalitzstad, everything would be all right, and was only faintly surprised when I began to believe it. I shut my eyes and tried to stop my heart from beating so quickly. Then I held my breath and snapped every knot. The rope loosened, but I held it so that it did not fall.

  The private glanced up. “Look,” he said, in a low voice, “I really am sorry. I don’t know what to do about this.” I did not answer. He got up and paced away from me, down the street, and raised his hands to his face. In that moment, I moved. I picked up the gun.

  The sergeant, suddenly at the door, shouted, “Saltworth, I told you to watch him!” He swore and took a step toward me.

  This time I aimed properly. I shot the glass out of the windows of the house. The sergeant threw up his arms to cover his face, and the other boys were shouting and jostling to the door. I turned and ran.

  I could hear them shouting behind me, but I did not listen. I raced down a side alley, then cut across the yard of an inn and came out on a different street. I went on running. Soldiers turned briefly as I passed them, but they were all preoccupied and no one stopped me. I fought my way through an old barbed-wire fence and across a stretch of waste ground, and then I was running through the narrow streets again. Somewhere ahead a church bell was chiming. I could see the cross on the tower suddenly, and hills beyond that, and I ran in that direction. For some reason I could not get my arms and legs to work properly. I stumbled and fell more than once. But every time I stopped, I thought I heard shouting voices behind me, and that drove me on.

  I came up to a fence, and beyond it was the churchyard. Soldiers were filing in at the gate, but I ran past them and dropped down on a stone seat beside the door. I could no longer hear shouting. I breathed out. My hands were bleeding from climbing through that barbed wire. I rubbed the palms against my trousers and shut my eyes.

  When I opened them again, a young private was watching me with what looked like faint amusement. The other soldiers had gone into the church; he was the only one left. He lingered in the doorway. “Mass is about to start,” he said. “You are not coming in?” I shook my head.

  A hymn began inside, and it made me think of Stirling humming on the way back from church. And I realized that even if I got back to Kalitzstad, nothing would be all right again. I wished I had let them put me in prison. Sometimes physical hardship makes you forget to think. “Are you all right?” said the soldier, still watching me. “You seem troubled by something. You must be one of these cadets that they have called up suddenly.”

  The hymn finished and he glanced into the church but did not move from where he stood. “You are not religious?” he said, turning back to me. I shook my head again. “I’m not,” he said. “But I’m going to the border. I want to go to Mass before I leave. Maybe that is bad religion.” He shrugged. “I have a brother at home about your age,” he went on. “He would be fifteen. He works down in the harbor. He promised to take care of my wife and my little girl.”

  I did not answer. My heart was beating so loudly that some of the time I could not hear him. He did not seem to notice. He hesitated, then sat down on the bench beside me, searching in his pocket. He took out a sheet of paper and smoothed it carefully. “My little girl drew this. She’s only three but she can draw. Look.” He began pointing out what the picture was supposed to be. I went on watching him in silence. I could barely follow what he was saying to me, but I did not want him to leave me here alone either. He traced each line of that child’s drawing, then folded it and put it back into his pocket.

  The psalm had started by the time he got up to go into the church. He looked at me for a moment then, frowning as though he had only just seen me properly. “Is that your gun?” he said. “They are giving the cadets pistols?” He frowned again, then shrugged. “To be honest with you, nothing would surprise me anymore, with this war. Let me see that.”

  He took the gun from me silently and examined it, then adjusted the safety catch. “Did they not teach you?” he said. “Leave that on. You d
on’t want to have an accident.” He handed it back. “Goodbye, then. I am glad I spoke with you.” Then he turned and went into the church.

  I waited for my heart to slow, but time passed and it didn’t. Then I got to my feet and crossed the churchyard. I could see, beyond the fence, the lines of war graves, row on row of them, all identical. They stretched across the hills for a mile or more. I stopped at the fence, where the summer flowers and the long grass ended abruptly, and looked out over those endless graves. And then I looked beyond, across the cornfields and the marshes and the edge of the eastern hills. Kalitzstad, a hazy red island, was visible in the distance. I thought about climbing over the fence and walking back there.

  And then I was on my knees in the grass, with the tears pouring down my face. The pain in my heart was so bad that I thought I was dying. I wondered if I really was. You can die just by wanting to be dead. We had a dog, when I was about four years old, that died like that. My parents sold its only puppy, and it just lay like a stone on its rug until one day it didn’t wake up. That’s what I felt like. As though if I let myself think about Stirling being dead, my heart would just stop beating.

  And then someone spoke, close by. I turned. But I was alone. It was the Voice, speaking quite differently from how it had before. “If you get back to Kalitzstad, things will be all right,” said the Voice. “If you get back to the city. You’ll see.” I was not even surprised at how loud it sounded. I did not care.

  My legs were shaking, and I could barely keep hold of the gun, my hands were growing so weak. I don’t know why I didn’t let myself think about Stirling, but forced myself to get up, still crying, and climb over the fence and begin walking. For the same reason I froze when the sergeant fired that shot. Not because I valued my life, but because life still had possession of me.

  As I stumbled across the open country, I asked the Voice to protect me, to take me somewhere else so that I did not have to think. I remembered that dream—the English mist, the girl, the prince, and Aldebaran. I wanted to go back to a time before Stirling was gone, or a place where none of us existed—not Stirling, or Grandmother, or the sergeant I had shot at, or even me, Leo North. I concentrated all my mind on it. And maybe it was because I was so tired, but I began to see things. Aldebaran, at a desk in that other country, leafing through papers. The prince standing beside him. The girl, Anna, dancing.

  “Ryan, you are not paying attention,” said Aldebaran, pushing back his chair.

  “What?” Ryan turned.

  Aldebaran shut the book and went to stand beside him at the window. “What are you looking at?” he demanded.

  “Just the hotel.” Ryan pointed to the white stone building, a quarter of a mile away, along the shore of the lake. “I was thinking, Uncle. I’m sorry.”

  “Shall I read that to you again? I was going over the messages from our allies. I wanted your opinion on whether we should condone a campaign of sabotage or tell them to wait until your return to the country is imminent.”

  “Uncle, whatever I say, you will do what you yourself think best.”

  “That may be so, but I want your opinion. The time will come when you will have to rule alone. Ryan, you are not listening again.”

  “That girl we met …,” Ryan began. “Anna.”

  “What about her?”

  “Why did you look at her like that? As though you recognized the name Devere.”

  Aldebaran sat down again and examined the pen in his hand without speaking. Then he said, “If I tell you, you will not pass it on to her. I know you have been there and spoken to her.”

  “I was passing on the road this morning, that was all.”

  “This is a serious matter. Do you understand? Not to be passed on.”

  The boy hesitated for a moment. Then he turned to Aldebaran and said, “Yes, Uncle. I understand.”

  Anna was spinning in the middle of the empty hotel dining room, and her eyes were on the window where Ryan stood. From this distance she could not see that he was there. But the glass was catching the sunlight, and she fixed her gaze on it to stop herself from moving from the spot. “Will you come and help me with this ironing?” Monica called from the kitchen, but Anna did not hear.

  It was only when Monica took hold of her arm that she started and turned, landing hard on the floorboards. “Will you come and help me?” Monica repeated. Anna followed her.

  In the corridor, guests were passing on their way out of the building. Daniel, the chef, was at the sink, washing the last saucepans from breakfast. “Is that where Ryan and his uncle live?” Anna asked. “That house you can just see on the edge of the lake.”

  “Yes, that’s Lakebank,” said Monica. “It’s an old manor house. Here, take this. I’m trying to fix the kettle.”

  “A manor house?” said Anna, taking the iron from her. Monica examined the dismantled parts of the electric kettle strewn over the kitchen table. “Do you know them well?” said Anna.

  “No one does. They keep to themselves. That’s landed gentry for you.”

  “Is that what they are?”

  “Apparently. Mr. Field is a sort of recluse, I think. Why else would you live in a big house like that, with gates ten feet high and all the rest? I speak to Ryan, though, when he passes. He’s a polite boy. The uncle is strict with him.”

  “He seems like a strange man,” said Anna.

  “He’s eccentric, but there is nothing wrong with him.”

  Daniel hung up his apron and picked up his car keys from the sideboard. “You will never fix that,” he told Monica, leaning over her shoulder to look at the kettle. “You shouldn’t have taken it apart yourself. Buy a new one—that’s what I think. I’m going to Lowcastle; I will be back in a couple of hours.” He turned and left the kitchen. Monica frowned after him, pushing her hair off her face. She had the same blond ringlets as Anna’s mother; they caught the light now as she shook her head impatiently.

  “What were we talking about?” she said. “Oh yes—Mr. Field. There is not much more to tell you. He has lived here fifteen or twenty years, they say, and he is a stranger to everybody.”

  The Voice was telling me a story as I walked, in fragments and faint images that were hardly real. Perhaps I wanted so desperately to be somewhere else that my mind had conjured these things—the prince, the girl who was our English relative, Aldebaran as he appeared to a stranger. And after a while I grew too tired. All I could see now was what was there in front of me—the marsh and then the hills, deserted, with the wind sweeping over them. It was so bleak and empty that the tears ran down my face as I walked, and I thought of Stirling and no longer had the energy to stop myself. But I kept walking.

  Eventually it grew so dark that I could not go on. I could see the lights in Kalitzstad, but I couldn’t see where I put my feet. I stumbled and fell. I did not get up after that. I lay down, with my head on a rock, to wait for sunrise. I could not understand why I hadn’t reached the city yet, but it was several miles away and I could go no farther.

  It was eerie in the hills at night. I could hear slow footsteps on the grass, coming closer and then moving away again. And someone breathed. The darkness pressed in close, but I saw something glint in it. Perhaps someone was watching me, waiting for my eyes to close. Only I wasn’t quite sure if it was real, or if I imagined it all, or if I was dreaming.

  This is what it’s like all the time for you now, Stirling, I thought. Lying alone in the dark, with only the dead for company. I couldn’t bear it. “Stirling’s in heaven now,” said the Voice, sounding like Father Dunstan or Grandmother. “Now go to sleep.” I shut my eyes.

  Listening to the footsteps, I imagined it was the Voice, incarnated in the safety of the dark, where I could not see its form, padding gently around me like a guardian angel. As I drifted into sleep, I realized that the footsteps were only my own heartbeat.

  And even in the wilderness, I dreamed. It was England again, and night there also, and over Aldebaran, the prince, and Anna, the same stars were
shining.

  “Anna, stop dancing now,” Monica was calling. “It’s late; you will disturb the guests.”

  “I have to practice,” said Anna.

  “I know. But please—can’t you do it tomorrow? And dancing in those shoes will damage the floor.”

  “I didn’t have time to go up and get my ballet shoes or I would have done.”

  “Have you finished sweeping?”

  “Yes. I put the broom away.”

  Anna stopped where she was and leaned against the stack of tables in the deserted dining room. Through the open doors she could see the constellations, patterns she knew well. Monica was walking about the kitchen putting things away, her heeled shoes echoing on the tiles. “Are you looking at the stars?” she said then. Anna nodded. “I remember when you were four years old and Mam bought you that astronomy book. You were so determined to learn them. Michelle thought you were too young for a book on astronomy. But maybe she wasn’t the one who knew you best.”

  Monica fell silent. Anna was thinking then of the clear nights that winter after her Nan had died, when she had propped the book on the radiator under her window and learned the patterns of the constellations. Monica, leaning against the kitchen doorway, was thinking of the same thing. In the darkness they could hear the waterfalls. They were close, somewhere out there beyond the open doors.

  Monica was still standing there when Anna came back to the kitchen. She was looking at the line of photographs on the windowsill. “Do you know what is strange?” she said, turning.

  Anna came to stand beside her. “What is?”

  “We’re the only ones left—Michelle, you, and me.”

  It was true. Half the people laughing so surely in the photographs were gone now. “That’s why I came here to help you,” said Anna. “We’re still a family.”

  Monica turned to her and seemed about to speak, then put her hand on Anna’s shoulder for a moment. “I don’t know what that picture of Richard is doing still there,” she said then. “I should take it down.” She picked up the photograph of her former husband and brushed the dust off it, then put it back.