Bedtime Story

by Robert J. Wiersema

  “The Queen,” the captain said, “has requested our presence for dinner. There are clothes in the wardrobe. It would be best if you washed yourself first.”

  Matthias could not remember ever having had a true bath. There was a small tub for linens in his mother’s kitchen, but he had spent his life doing little more than scrubbing himself with a cool cloth in his room above the tavern, and so now he watched, fascinated, as the tub was filled by a line of servants. Languishing in a tub of steaming water was an alien idea, but once the magus and Captain Bream had departed, he took to it quickly.

  Afterward, he dressed in a uniform similar to the one that the captain was wearing when he returned to collect him.

  Bream led him down several flights of stairs, from the apartments and sleeping quarters to the main level of the castle. In a wide, marble corridor, the captain stopped and straightened his uniform.

  “Shall we?” he said, stepping toward the double doors at the end of the entry hall.

  Matthias tried to calm his racing heart as the captain pushed the doors open and he had his first glimpse of the throne room.

  The space was huge, with mammoth pillars supporting a high, vaulted ceiling. The Queen was on her throne on a dais at the far end of the room, the King’s throne empty next to her. Below, several large tables sagged under the weight of food and wine, and another was set with silver and crystal.

  “It is quite a sight, is it not?”

  Matthias was overcome, unable to speak. He looked around the room, trying to consign the details to his memory to be able to tell Arian when next he saw her. But there was simply too much to see, too much beauty for him to even begin to absorb.

  As they approached, the Queen rose slowly from her throne, the folds of her gown seeming to fall into place in a cataract of silk and jewels. Loren was there as well, standing between the two thrones, a step back, almost lost in the shadows.

  “Captain Bream,” the Queen said as they stopped in front of the dais. “Matthias.”

  Matthias knew enough now to take a knee, dropping to the cold stone floor in unison with the soldier.

  “Your Majesty,” they said, almost in a single voice.

  “Gentlemen,” she said, stepping down toward them, “please.” She gestured for them to rise. “The kitchen has sent us a handsome feast. Let us not watch it grow cold.”

  As they settled around the smaller table, a servant poured a clear liquid into a small glass before the Queen, and then into those of her guests.

  A handmaiden sipped from Matthias’s glass, and as she did so his eyes met hers. She smiled and looked down at the table, her face glowing red.

  “A spirit,” the Queen said, “to honour the fallen.”

  The spirit burned as it touched the back of his throat. He tried to sip gingerly, but everyone else poured the entire contents of their small glasses into their mouths, closing their eyes as they swallowed. When he followed suit, he almost choked. It was stronger by far than anything he had ever drunk before.

  He had only heard whispers about grand meals like this, which always began with the strongest of liquors. The next thing, he thought, would be—

  The magus cleared his throat and bowed his head. “We offer our service to you, oh Father and Mother …”

  The captain bowed his head automatically. As Matthias was lowering his, he glanced to where the Queen was sitting, implacably, at the head of the table. She didn’t lower hers.

  “A toast,” the Queen said after the magus finished the prayer. The handmaidens were now pouring wine into huge crystal goblets. “To the success of this expedition,” she continued. “To the three men who will be the salvation of the kingdom. And to the King.”

  “To the King,” Bream and the magus said in unison, before drinking.

  Matthias tripped over his words trying to catch up, and drowned his embarrassment in his glass. The wine was slightly cool, hearty and spicy.

  Matthias glanced at the empty thrones as he set his glass back down, thinking of the dying man, and the captain’s vision of the crown trampled in the dirt.

  “Brother Loren has told me of your star signs and the particulars of your birth, Matthias,” the Queen said. “But I know little else about the young man I have charged with so dire a mission. I understand that your mother owns a tavern?”

  “Yes, Your Majesty,” he said, swallowing a little uneasily. “The Mermaid’s Rest.”

  “On the island itself?”

  “One of the only taverns within the walls, Your Majesty.”

  “That’s quite an honour for a woman,” she said. “And quite a responsibility.”

  “She works very hard, Your Majesty.”

  “I would imagine she does. And your father?” Her handmaiden slid a bowl of steaming soup in front of her; the Queen did not seem to notice.

  “He … my mother doesn’t really speak of him, Your Majesty,” he said awkwardly.

  For all her larger-than-life forthrightness, Mareigh was tight-lipped about Matthias’s father. Over the years her son had managed to glean a few details, like crumbs fallen to a hungry dog. She had been a tavern girl, only a little older than Arian; he was a guardsman. They had met before the last war with the Berok. By the time she found that she was with child, he was deep in battle, gone from her life. The money that he sent, after the war, had provided the means for her to buy the tavern where she had worked. Matthias imagined that the Royal Fiat, allowing his mother to move the tavern within the walls, had come as a result of his father’s heroics, a favour from the King which he then passed to the woman he had left behind and the son he had never met.

  “It must have been difficult for you,” Captain Bream said, “growing up without a father.” He leaned back to allow a bowl to be placed in front of him.

  When Matthias looked at him, Captain Bream turned his eyes away, but not before Matthias saw in them something that looked like understanding.

  “My mother is very strong …” His voice trailed off.

  “That she is,” the captain said quietly, still staring down at his plate.

  “You know the boy’s mother, then, Captain?”

  “I do,” he said slowly. “Though before last night I had not seen her since I received my rank.”

  “She must be a very fine woman to elicit such loyalty from her son.”

  “That she is.”

  Matthias leaned back to allow the handmaiden to place the bowl in front of him. Her shy smile, the way she kept her eyes lowered, reminded him of Arian. “Thank you,” he whispered, and her smile widened.

  She seemed to move closer to him as she picked up a spoon, filled it carefully from his bowl, and lifted it gently to her lips.

  “The Mermaid is very popular among the men,” the captain said. “And Mareigh runs it—”

  The captain snapped to his feet at the same moment that Matthias heard the anguished cry from the handmaiden. Her hands were grabbing at her throat, her face livid and red. She clutched at the front of her gown, tugging at it, as her body heaved. She gave a choked, pained whoop, and swayed on her feet, stumbled, then fell to the floor of the throne room. Her body heaved for a moment longer, then fell still. Her wide eyes stared sightlessly at the ceiling as a tendril of blood ran from her nose.

  Matthias glanced away from the body, frantically looking around the table. He expected to see the other handmaidens so afflicted, but they were staring back at him, their mouths wide.

  “Poison,” the Queen hissed, shoving her bowl off the table with the side of her hand.

  Loren had come around to study the face of the fallen girl. She looked so young, lying on the floor. “But just for the boy.”

  Bream pulled himself to his full height. “Your Majesty, the Berok have infiltrated the castle.”

  I must have drifted off while reading, because the next thing I was aware of was the sound of David’s footsteps on the front steps. His stride was slow and heavy, every footfall thick and deliberate.

  “How you d
oin’, sport?” I called out as he opened the front door. Thankfully, the micro-nap had taken the edge off: the one thing about getting up so early every morning was the need for an afternoon sleep.

  “Fine,” he said quietly, closing the door behind himself.

  “You don’t sound convinced.”

  He came around the corner, looking at me, not saying anything.

  “How was school?”

  “Fine,” he repeated as he kicked off his shoes.

  He wasn’t meeting my eye.

  “Do you want a snack?”

  He let the straps of his backpack slip off his shoulders, dropping it to the floor. Everything about him seemed slow, dispirited somehow.

  “Sure,” he said.

  I waited for him to say something else, anything else.

  “I’m gonna go upstairs,” he said, finally.

  “Okay. I’ll bring you up a sandwich.”

  He didn’t reply, just trudged through the house.

  Jacqui glanced down at the paper, then back up to my face, questioningly.

  I had been waiting all day for this moment, and I wanted to get it right. Jacqui was covering a half-shift this evening, so after getting David his snack I waited while she changed and bustled around the kitchen, making some toast to tide herself over.

  “It’s my column,” I explained, though it should have been obvious.

  “I can tell,” she said. “It’s been a while.”

  “I thought you might like this one.”

  I tried not to watch her as she read; the piece wasn’t long, but the time seemed to stretch agonizingly slowly. I ran water in the sink, started taking things out of the fridge, put a pan on the stove—anything to avoid even glancing at her. She hated me watching her read.

  Which was too bad. She was beautiful when she was reading.

  Jacqui had been my first reader almost since the day we met. She would give my English papers a quick once-over, but when it came to those early short stories, she was tireless. I would hand her fresh pages and she would hand them back to me so covered in red ink they seemed to be bleeding.

  I became a better writer, writing for her.

  OFF THE SHELF

  CHRISTOPHER KNOX

  The summer that I was eleven, my life was changed forever. No, more than that—the world was changed forever, and I was pulled along with it.

  The summer that I was eleven, my father died. His death was neither quick nor merciful: he died of lung cancer, and spent weeks wasting away in a hospital bed. He had always been a strong man, a builder, and I imagined that I would grow up to be like him: broad-shouldered and confident, always with an easy smile and a kind word. My father was the sort of man that I wanted to be. That I still want to be, truth be told.

  The last time I saw him, I barely recognized him. The cancer had laid waste to his body: the man who had towered over me was now tiny and frail. His hair was gone, and his hands shook when he reached out to touch me. He still had the same smile, though—that was how I recognized him, the only way I could be sure that this small man was really my father.

  That was three weeks before he died—I didn’t see him after that. My mother sent me with my younger brothers to stay with my father’s parents on their farm in Henderson, B.C. Even if you’ve heard of it, you’ve probably never been there—it’s that sort of town.

  My brothers took to country life with a passion. Too young to understand what was happening to our father, they treated our displacement as a vacation. They spent their days playing in the fields, or exploring the woods behind the farm, cutting trails and building forts.

  I mostly stayed in the house, close to my grandparents, close to the telephone, waiting for it to ring with my mother’s frequent updates.

  It was a terrible, nightmarish summer, and I’m not sure I would have survived it, save for the discovery I made in the basement one afternoon. I don’t even know what I was looking for—probably something my grandmother had sent me to find to keep me out from underfoot—but I discovered a box in a stack in one corner, a box marked with the name Richard Knox. My father’s name.

  I didn’t take it upstairs: I dug into it right there, angling it so the ceiling light would shine into it.

  At first, the box seemed like a disorganized mess, a hodgepodge of newspaper clippings, ribbons and trophies, yearbooks and photographs, report cards and a few envelopes that still held letters. It took me a while of digging through to realize that I was actually holding my father’s childhood in my hands, sifting through his memories, all the things he had chosen to preserve.

  At the bottom of the box, I found a handful of books—paperbacks in fairly poor shape, battered and spine-broken, obviously well read and deeply loved. I ignored the westerns (I still do), but there were four other books, books that promised adventure and daring, with bright pictures of knights and swordsmen, battles and beautiful maidens on their covers.

  I put everything else back into the box, but I carried those books with me out into the summer afternoon sunlight. It would probably be an exaggeration to say that those books, four fantasy novels by an author named Lazarus Took, saved my life, but they saved me in a way that only the experience of reading can. I devoured those books, one after another, then I went back and began to reread them, more slowly, with greater attention and devotion.

  I spent those weeks reading, lying in the field or perched up in one of the apple trees, up in the room that I was sharing with my brothers or in the privacy of the hayloft.

  Like the best books, the novels I found in my father’s box were capable of magic—they took me to another world, made me feel more deeply there than I could allow myself to feel in the real world. While I was reading, I ceased to be little Christopher Knox—I became someone else entirely.

  And that’s what books should do for us. I haven’t thought about Lazarus Took in decades, but I still recall how it felt to read those novels, the impact they had on my life, on my heart. Everyone has books like that in their past, forgotten treasures from their childhood. What are yours?

  She cleared her throat, and I turned toward her.

  “This is good,” she said, gesturing with the paper.

  “Thanks.” I could feel my face warming.

  “I didn’t …” she began, and glanced away. “Why didn’t you tell me how important that book was to you?”

  I shrugged. I had been thinking about it since the day I found To the Four Directions at Prospero’s. “I wasn’t really able to put it into words,” I said lamely.

  Jacqui gestured with the paper again. “You seemed to do just fine with this.”

  “Yeah.” That was my curse: I was always better with words on paper than I was with actually talking to people. Especially the people closest to me.

  “You should tell David,” she said. “Maybe …”

  I shook my head. “No. I don’t want—” I broke off. “I don’t think it’s something that I want to talk to him about yet. My dad dying …”

  She nodded, and seemed about to speak, but we both heard a sound outside the kitchen door. Seconds later, David appeared, clutching his sandwich plate.

  “I brought my dishes down,” he said, with a wide smile. “What’s for dinner?”

  I hadn’t heard him come down the stairs. How long, I wondered, had he been standing outside the room, listening?

  “So are you all brushed up?” I asked as I came through Davy’s door. He was sitting up in bed, covers draped over his lap, holding his new baseball glove. “Had a pee?” He nodded. “Nolan fed?” I glanced over at the hamster cage.

  “Yes, Dad,” he said in the much-exasperated tone that was part of the routine.

  I stopped at the bookshelf by the door and picked up our leather bookmark. “So, what do you want to start next?”

  “What about the one you gave me? I brought it up from downstairs.”

  When I turned to him, he gestured with the baseball glove toward his bedside table where To the Four Directions lay
beside the lamp.

  I stepped toward the desk, rested my hand on the back of his chair. He wasn’t looking at me.

  “Are you sure?” I asked, pulling the chair over to the bed. “You didn’t seem too keen on it.”

  He shrugged, pushing a ball into the web of the glove. “I don’t know,” he said. “It’s not The Lord of the Rings, but it might be all right.”

  I resisted the urge to kiss the top of his head. “Well, let’s find out,” I said, opening the book. “Assume the position, sport.”

  He didn’t lie down the way he usually did. “Dad,” he said, extending the glove slightly toward me. “Can you help me with this?”

  I looked at the glove, with absolutely no idea what to do with it.

  “Can you help me put this under my mattress?”

  “Isn’t that going to be uncomfortable?”

  “It’s just for another couple of nights. Coach says—”

  “Right.”

  Together we managed to get the glove set firmly in place. When he lay down he shifted several times, twisting and contorting, the way a cat will settle to the contours of its bed and manage to look completely comfortable once it’s done.

  “You all right?” I asked, when he seemed settled.

  “I think so,” he said, shifting a bit more. “It’s a bit lumpy …”

  “Pea under your bed, Princess?” I asked, putting on a fake British accent.

  “No, I didn’t!”

  We both laughed. Quick-witted, my boy.

  “Okay.” I opened the book again. “To the Four Directions, by Lazarus Took.”

  “Read by Christopher Knox,” he said, imitating the introductions used in the audio-books we listened to in the van.

  I smiled, at home in at least this little bit of routine.

  A few pages into the first chapter, he stopped me.

  “You don’t have to do that anymore, you know.”

  “Do what?”

  “That thing you do where you call the people in books David for me? You don’t need to do that anymore—I’m eleven years old now.”