The Eyes of a King

by Catherine Banner

  “Yes, I see. Have you talked to Aldebaran?”

  “I cannot change anything now. But even so, I am more glad than I can say to be able to talk to you like this.” He got up then and went to the window. “Anna, shall I stay here until you fall asleep? Let me do that; I don’t mind.”

  “All right. Thank you.”

  After a while had passed, she said, “Lucien looked like you. I never told you.”

  Ryan smiled sadly at that. “Aldebaran says he looked more like me than my father did. That is how life goes.” He shook his head. “The whole thing is strange. If I had lived here in England a few more years, I would really have begun to think that the rest was just a dream.”

  “Leo, what are you doing?” said Grandmother. It was afternoon, I could tell from the light, and I was sitting on the window-sill as I used to do often. And I was writing. “I thought you were asleep,” she said. “What are you writing about?”

  I did not know. I had been asleep, but now I was writing in the margin of the newspaper, as though I had something urgent to set down. And the handwriting did not look like my own. It looked like the mysterious writer’s—the great one who Stirling and I had spent so long talking about, the one who had written in that book that I’d thrown away. I turned the pages, startled. I had written all kinds of things. The names stood out from the rest—Aldebaran, Ryan, Anna.

  I folded the pages and put them in the windowsill chest without reading them. All that time I had been frightened that someone was trying to communicate with us—a powerful great one, even Aldebaran himself. I did not know what to think now. Was that all the great mystery was, the mystery that had sustained us through Stirling’s illness and carried me home from Ositha? Just a story I had written because I was desperate and haunted by strange dreams? I realized that the last of the magic had drifted away. I found I didn’t care.

  “The gunshots have stopped, thank heavens,” said Grandmother. She was sitting in her old chair, as she used to. She had drawn back the curtains, and the room was so bright and strange that my eyes began watering. We had kept them shut these past days. I stepped into the shadow of the boarded window. “Did you notice it, Leo?” she said. “Did you notice the silence?”

  I nodded and sat down at the table. “Maria came past while you were sleeping,” said Grandmother. “She says she thinks it is safe to go out now, and the newspapers may have started up again. She went to find out what has been happening.”

  None of us had known, these past days. We had stayed in the building and sat up at nights while bursts of gunfire shattered the darkness and glass exploded far away. Every night it was like that. Some people said it was the Alcyrians, or rebels, but those were just rumors. Father Dunstan came once or twice. If he knew what was happening out in the city, I could not remember him telling us. The streets were deserted. Not even the soldiers were moving about.

  “They never did come back,” said Grandmother, as though she could tell my thoughts. “Those soldiers never did come to take me away. Their threats are greater than their actions, these young men.” She smiled, but shakily. I nodded. Even so, I checked for the hundredth time that the door was bolted.

  “Things are changing,” said Grandmother. “I’m sure they are. I am too old for this, I must confess. I am glad that it is quiet at last today. You cannot even hear the gunshots from the northeast border.” She crossed the room slowly and sat opposite me. “They say they have closed the schools,” she said. “You would not have gone back anyway, would you?”

  I shook my head.

  We sat in silence for a long time. Then she got up and forced her mouth into a smile. “I know I had one of those strange turns earlier, but I am better now,” she said. “I made some dinner.” She hurried to the kitchen, brought back two bowls, and set them down on the table. Then she said, “How long was it this morning before I was myself again? Tell me the truth, Leo.”

  She passed me a three-week-old newspaper, now covered in my own scrawling handwriting. They were ordinary messages: Later; ask Father Dunstan about it; half an hour; I will make the dinner. All the words I could no longer say. I examined them, turning the newspaper around to read all four margins. “Leo,” said Grandmother. “How long?”

  I picked up the pencil and wrote, Two hours.

  “Two hours?” She smiled too cheerily. “Less than yesterday, then. That is good news.”

  It was not exactly the truth. I reduced the figure every day. “I remember some of it,” she said. “I was not so far gone as I sometimes am. You were holding the baby, weren’t you? Maria was talking to me, and you were holding the baby.”

  I nodded. That was true. Maria can bring you back better than me sometimes, I wrote.

  “Yes.” She stirred the soup in her bowl. “She is one of the kindest people I have known. I don’t know what we would do without her, especially now.” Her voice quavered, and she bent her head over the bowl. It was still less than a month since Stirling had died. I felt as though in these past four weeks I had lived a hundred years. And yet I could not get used to it either.

  “Will Father Dunstan visit later on?” said Grandmother. I shook my head. He had been there in the morning, while she had told me she didn’t recognize me and asked us again and again to fetch Harold. Tomorrow, I wrote. He said that he would come tomorrow, if the city is still quiet.

  She nodded, then sighed. “I am so tired suddenly. I’ll go to bed after dinner, I think. You won’t mind, Leo?” I shook my head and took a spoonful of my soup, the usual vegetable stew. When I tasted it, I almost spat it out again. She had made it with cold water.

  After Grandmother had gone to bed, the wind rose outside. I lit the lamp, put it on the table, and sat and thought of nothing. I could hear the neighbors passing on the stairs outside the apartment, and then silence and darkness fell. About nine o’clock Maria came to the door to check if we were all right, then went on upstairs with the baby.

  I don’t know why, but I sat down at the table and started writing all over the remaining margins of the newspapers. I wrote letters to everyone I could think of—to my father, about how he should never have left us; to Ahira, about why I had fired that shot; and then to Stirling. To Stirling I wrote all kinds of things—how the wind sounded outside and what the boarded window looked like and how the grass was growing on his grave, and little flowers too, small white flowers that Grandmother said were beautiful and should stay there even though they were weeds. Then I held the letters to the oil lamp and burned them one by one. The varnish of the table sent up a hot, acid smell. I had to leave the apartment.

  I put on my overcoat and set off for the graveyard. I didn’t look to the left or to the right. It wasn’t until I was almost upon the Victoire Bridge that I realized that the bridge was no longer there. Two crossed planks of wood had been nailed across the gap between the houses, and the same across the graveyard gate, and in between was nothing but the drop to the river below. The Victoire Bridge had been smashed away.

  I went round by the North Bridge. I sat beside Stirling’s grave and looked at the letters engraved on the cross. The grass on the grave was growing taller. The wood was softened with the first traces of lichen and mildew. I sat and thought about Stirling. I hadn’t heard his voice or seen his face for three weeks or more. It was longer than I ever remembered being away from him. When he was a baby, my mother took him south to visit her relatives for a week; another time, when I was in the sixth year of school, my platoon went on a three-day march in the west country. Apart from that, we had been together every day since he was born.

  The day after Stirling had died, and the next day, and the next day, I had thought I was in a dream. As if I might wake up—as if Stirling might walk in through the door—and it would turn out to be a mistake. But the dream went on and I didn’t wake. I wanted to stop time, to somehow drag it back to the point when things made sense. The world moved on too quickly, and every passing day forced my hope that Stirling might come back further and furthe
r away. The grass was growing; the words on the stone were fading; days had passed already and would become months and years. And this tiredness had come over me—this dreamlike, sick tiredness—and I just let it.

  So in the end all I could do was sit on Stirling’s grave while the darkness grew darker. Then I turned around and walked home.

  I would be lying if I said I noticed the strange flags on the castle. I didn’t. And I didn’t notice the slogans on the walls. I noticed the soldiers, though. They had gone. There were no soldiers in the city. I looked about for them, around every corner, but they were not there. The streets were deserted.

  When you are dreaming, you never know when you will wake. Sometimes it startles you. That was how it was with the strange tiredness that had surrounded me since that night when Ahira fell. I was back in the apartment, and I knew I would not sleep, so I piled up the plates from dinner and took them down to the yard to wash them. I could have brought the water up in the jar, but I did not have the strength.

  It was silent out in the yard. The shadow of the water pump fell long across the ground. I washed the plates in the moonlight, then stacked them and went quietly back up the stairs. I could tell from the silence that everyone else in the building was sleeping. Even Grandmother was; she had been asleep when I had got back from the graveyard.

  I reached the apartment and put the pile of plates on the table, then turned to shut the door. And then suddenly I was no longer dreaming, and I realized what I had done. Less than a week ago, I had shot Ahira and watched him die by my feet in the mud of the road—and here I was washing up plates as though everything was normal. I had not thought much about it while the gunshots and the explosions had kept us awake and frightened. Now it seemed suddenly as though I was falling back into normal life. But how could I? How could I ever believe that things would be normal again?

  I wished with all my heart that I could leave this apartment and never come back. Everything was gathering dust. Grandmother’s sleeping face, in the half-light, was strangely faded and old. I had no assurance that my family was protected anymore. Grandmother was losing her mind. Stirling was gone. I had shot that man. My life was destroyed, and I was acting out normality as though I could ever put it back together again.

  I paced through the empty apartment. Stirling’s boots, with their carefully arranged laces, and Grandmother’s old chair, standing still and empty, as though she was already gone, made me sick with fear. I felt suddenly that I could not go on here. I wanted to get up and walk away. I wanted to be exiled from all this. I had come home because I was afraid of what would happen to Grandmother if I left her alone, and because I could not shoot myself; I could not do it. But now I was slipping back into the normal things, as though I had already forgotten Stirling and Ahira’s blood was on someone else’s hands. It made me sick to think of it—that I had dressed this morning and gone down to fetch the water, and I was a murderer. And no one knew.

  “Leo?” said a voice behind me, and I turned. I suppose I must have left the door open, because Maria was beside me, with Anselm in her arms. She laid a newspaper down on the table. “I wanted to show this to you,” she said. “I could not sleep.”

  It was our old newspaper, with a different title. I looked at it without seeing it. “Here,” she said. “They are all of them dead.” She pointed to a list. They were Lucien’s famous men—military commanders. “It makes me sad to think of it,” she said. “I don’t know why.”

  Ahira’s name was there. It stood out from the list as though I’d known him. There it was in printed letters. I had done that. I had put his name there in the list of the dead when I had pulled the trigger of that rifle.

  I grew sick and began to shiver. I pushed the newspaper away, catching hold of the table to steady myself. And then I thought that there was nothing to stand on anymore, that I would just fall through the world and disappear. I knelt on the floor and cried and cried with fear.

  “Leo,” Maria said. “Oh, Leo. It’s not fair. That this should have happened to you. All you wanted was to look after Stirling and now …” She trailed off, reached for my hand, and took hold of it tightly.

  But maybe I deserved it. Maybe I deserved everything that happened to me. That was what I felt like then. I deserved anything, for being a murderer. I wished desperately that someone would punish me. I wished that someone would take their revenge. I wanted to turn myself in to the soldiers and be sentenced to death.

  I was the one who had taken revenge to begin with, but I had been too angry and I had gone too far. I would have given anything I had not to have done it—to be back there in the mud of the street, paralyzed with hatred for every soldier in this country, and to be given the choice again. I shut my eyes and prayed to go back, but I knew it was hopeless.

  “Don’t stay here on the floor, Leo,” Maria said. “Let me help you.” And she put the baby down on the sofa, though his crying rose. I managed to get up and collapse again in Grandmother’s chair. I had stopped crying, but I was shaking violently. I pressed my face to my knees. She put her arm about me until I stopped trembling.

  Anselm carried on crying. She went and got a chair, and pulled it up beside me. It reminded me of the day when she had come to Sunday dinner and Stirling had thought of going on a picnic. Everything was so terrible and so hopeless now. “Anselm needs feeding,” Maria said over the noise. “Sorry, Leo—do you mind?” I shook my head. Watching her feed the baby, I wondered how I had thought I loved her. Love didn’t mean anything to me anymore. Just meaningless words—all magic had left everything forever.

  Anselm began to fall asleep, and she laid him down on the sofa. “Sorry, Leo,” she whispered. “Now we can talk.” But I couldn’t. She got me a piece of paper, but my hands shook too badly to write.

  “I’ll just talk about ordinary things,” she said. I nodded. I didn’t want to hear about ordinary things, but I did not want her to leave me here alone either.

  But she didn’t talk about ordinary things. She said suddenly, “Everything’s so confused, Leo,” and she started crying as if her heart would break. I thought she meant my life, but she sobbed, “Sometimes I feel so lost.” She clutched my hand. “I just wish … I just wish I’d never done half the things I’ve done, but it’s too late. I used to have such a beautiful life, and I ruined it all.”

  I picked up the paper and wrote, Tell me. My writing looked like a kid’s, it was so shaky. We’re both lost, I thought. We were trying to guide each other but neither of us knew the way out.

  “I can’t tell you,” she said. “I’m sorry—you don’t want to hear this.” It made me think of when we had talked in the yard that time, when she had been here only a short while. I wished now that I had spent that time with my family, Grandmother and Stirling, the way things were before. “You don’t want to hear this,” she sobbed again.

  With a great effort, I wrote, I do.

  “Can I tell you everything? You won’t mind? Only I feel as if I’ll go mad sometimes, not telling anyone.” I nodded, to tell her to go on. I wished she would talk about herself, not me. I think she realized it.

  “It’s just …” She took a gulp of air. “I’ll try to explain. I feel so ashamed, Leo.” She took another gasping breath. “I used to have such a beautiful life. I didn’t have to worry about anything, and I had a pony, and a lovely house, and my mother and father were always happy. I was a completely different person. I used to look at places like this and think the people who lived in them just weren’t real. I told you already about how I was rich, before.” I nodded. “But I think when I told you, Leo, I gave the impression it was a long time ago.”

  She shook her head. “You know, when you have a beautiful life, you think it will last forever. And I wasn’t just rich, I was happy. But I can see now that no one’s happy for very long. Something spoils it.” She wiped the tears from her face with her palms, but they went on falling. “I’m all right; things aren’t so bad now. I know there are other things besides being hap
py. Other things to live for. There have to be, otherwise how can you bear it?” Then I realized she wasn’t only talking about herself.

  “I know that, but sometimes I just wish everything was simple like it used to be. I used to go to balls and parties with all sorts of rich and famous people. And I’d meet young men, and flirt with them, and see my father looking sort of embarrassed and pleased at the same time, you know, and I used to dream about marrying a rich man. All I worried about was what I would wear or whether I would remember to curtsy. I worry so much these days. And I know it’s my own fault, but … Can I tell you about Anselm’s father?” I nodded.

  “I met him at a ball, at his house. We danced together. That was when I was fourteen. I was such a silly, frivolous girl; I didn’t really think about anything, and I didn’t consider who he was or whether I liked him. I just liked dancing. And he led me out of the ballroom, and I just thought we were going out to the balcony. And I went along with it, because I liked the way he looked at me, like he really loved me, and I liked the way everyone else talked about it behind their hands.

  “And he led me farther, away from all the guests, and I knew why—of course I did. I must have done.” She stared intently at her hand clasped in mine. They were both shaking, and I could not tell whose had started it. “I was pretending to myself that I didn’t realize what he was thinking. I don’t know. And he took me to his bedroom. I should have just run away, but I was afraid because he was so important. An important man in government, and my father always said that you should be careful of those. And anyway, I thought maybe I loved him. I was quite wild. Several boys had asked me to marry them, and I’d come close to it with some of them. But it’s different with boys your own age.”