The Night Language

by David Rocklin

  The low whinnies of the horses came, slow and dissonant. Their hooves beat restlessly at the ground. Seely wouldn’t look at him. Maybe, he thought, she was afraid of consequences for being so blunt, or ashamed. Or maybe she’s simply being true to Windsor. Everyone here is warned against speaking too plainly, but what do all of us strangers come here for? To learn to speak, and then to use our new language to say what we couldn’t say before.

  Such a strange place.

  “Do you hate me for saying that?” She held the portrait tight.

  She has what matters to her, he thought. Not my friendship, or the warm blankets against winter, or a full belly and no chains. She has the moment she became beautiful, and look at her. She’d claw my eyes out and rot in a cell before she let me take it from her. You can’t let go of such a moment when you finally have it. Having it changes you.

  “No,” he said. “I think we’re not so different.”

  He walked out, leaving her to stare at the painting.

  §

  He led Seely back to the landau, helped her inside and stepped back as the driver closed the door.

  “Where will she go?” he asked the princess.

  “Naismith made it known he wanted to interview her,” the princess told him. “She’ll be on a three-penny steamer by nightfall, bound for the gardens at Cremorne. There’s a man of good reputation and some wealth who’s in need of a translator for his entertainers.”

  Seely held up Alamayou’s painting of her to the landau window, a glow of pride on her face.

  “Entertainers?” Philip asked.

  “He owns a traveling band of some myriad entertainments, Cooke’s Menagerie. Many of them hail from her part of the world.”

  Seely put her hand on the glass of the landau door as it began to roll. Alamayou pressed his against it, then let it fall away. The landau lumbered around the Spur of the Walk, onto the long stretch away from Windsor.

  “He’ll be good to her,” the princess assured them, “or he will hear from us. But there’s precious few places a girl like her can call home, I’m afraid.”

  The need overtook Alamayou to be somewhere high. Nearby was the Round Tower. He left for it as Philip watched the landau leave.

  Scrabbling up the side of the mound to the top, he sat as chalk dust filled his lungs. It was not what he had hoped for. Somewhere to simply breathe.

  He wondered if Seely would be made a gift yet again.

  The landau rolled through the gate, then turned onto one of the paths he’d seen when the queen had brought him to the top of the Round Tower with Seely. It passed the small church. A figure moved through the graveyard as the landau pulled alongside the fence line and came to a slow halt. They approached Charles and stood there for a few minutes, talking.

  A friend, Alamayou thought. Someone else who, like Charles, worked their life away in the shadow of Windsor, pulling weeds from among the dead and keeping the modest chapel clean in case the queen stopped by.

  No one moved in the carriage compartment. A royal would have thrown the door open and demanded an end to the delay.

  A royal, Alamayou thought, would have a hand in where she was going.

  Whatever she was doing inside, Seely kept herself inconspicuous. Soon the figure waved farewell and the carriage rolled on, west to another life. Only after it was in motion did the whip cracks’ sound reach him.

  The farther they traveled, the smaller the landau got, until it disappeared into the earth.

  §

  In the afternoon he and Philip rode to the Royal Zoo in the princess’s carriage. There was a crowd gathered at the zoo’s gates, as word of a royal visit had gone round.

  Cheers went up at the sight of the prince and princess. Many of the gathered Londoners were obviously poor. Their clothes were stained with the fluids of London’s formidable industries and their raised hands held withering peonies and small flags of empire in hopes of some acknowledgement.

  A keeper led them through the crowd to a special enclosure where a calf had recently been born to a mated pair of elephants. Inside the enclosure, the calf stood unsteadily next to its tuskless mother while she reached up to the high boughs of a tree and pulled its tender shoots down. The calf tried to nurse, but its mother’s restless feeding frustrated every attempt.

  Louise stood next to her brother, watching.

  “Will the queen come?” Philip asked them.

  “She’s rarely seen in public these days,” Prince Leopold said. “Certainly not for something as trivial as an outing with us.”

  “Has she decided? Have you heard anything?”

  “I know you’re anxious, as I’m sure Alamayou is,” the princess said soothingly. “I’ve heard nothing and I doubt highly that we will until the queen herself is ready to be heard on it. Between now and then, we just have to wait.”

  “And while you wait,” the prince said, “you might brush up on the manner in which you speak to royals. All we have in common is a roof, Mr. Layard.”

  “I ought to apologize.”

  “Indeed,” the prince said.

  “And I do,” Philip said, “without reservation. You and your family are singular and you’ve shown us nothing but kindness. But I’m living each day in fear of it being his last. You don’t understand.”

  “Having seen me bleed, I think you ought to know that I’m in an ideal situation to understand. Now, may I be allowed to free myself from this conversation? I’d like to watch a mother parent her child.”

  He returned to the elephant enclosure alone.

  “My God,” Philip said softly. “I’ve acted like a bloody idiot.”

  “Let him be,” the princess said. “We all feel the strains of our lives. Ours are usually reserved for ourselves. Frankly, it does us good to see someone as knotted with worry over someone else. It’s a reminder that such things exist.”

  After an hour, they departed the zoo and returned to the castle to freshen up before dinner. They came by a different route, one that took them through the winding lands that Alamayou had seen from the Round Tower with the queen and Seely.

  “That tiny church there,” the prince said as they rode by, “is where the queen slips off to sometimes, when she wants to pray without a fuss.” He smiled mischievously, a child giving up a family secret. “She’s so skilled at stealing away without telling anyone that it drives her service to drink. The staff at the church are used to her comings and goings. They stay out of her way in a manner that none at Windsor have ever managed to do.”

  Philip felt relieved. If the prince bore him any resentment for what he’d said at the zoo, it seemed to have dissipated.

  “I saw it from the tower,” Alamayou said. “Can I see inside?”

  “It’s no more than a cottage across the grounds from the Round Tower,” Prince Leopold said dismissively. “It serves as a burial site and memoriam to no one of significance. It can’t possibly be of any interest to you.”

  “It reminds me of something I saw in Abyssinia.”

  The prince told the driver to stop. “It’s nearly dusk. Quickly, now.”

  Alamayou got out. He left the road for the chapel. Within steps the landau grew smaller, but still he could see the others inside, watching him from the warmth of the compartment.

  He approached the ivy-covered rectory through a little garden of graves. At the weathered door, behind a copse of oak, he peered through a small square of glass.

  Inside the small chapel’s Gothic skeleton, all was grace. Quiet sunlight filled the inlaid tapestry paintings on the walls with a peaceful pale glow that encompassed the pews and the nave. High above, where images of saints and holies were fashioned of colored glass, he saw clouds floating across the watery blue sky.

  I feel like the man I was at the porthole, he thought. Straining to see the emerging city lights of London. How far away
that is from me now.

  Bowing his head, he muttered to himself. It was no prayer, as he didn’t believe in anything beyond what could be seen moving through life alongside all people. It was yet another failing in his father’s eyes.

  The old life gathered around him even as the new one waited back on the road, inside a fine landau.

  He remembered his father’s makeshift church, which had been built near the gate at Meqdala. His father had used slaves to cut the mountain’s stone and shape it into walls. It was meant to stand forever. Once, its door had been open slightly in a way that nothing in his father’s world was. It was as if he wanted his people to come in and be with him there. No one ever did, but Alamayou remembered the day he pushed that door open and went inside.

  A cross filled the bulging stone of the facing wall. No packed mud or grit between the rocks; nothing visible held his father’s church together. The otherness of the cross and the haphazard stone had filled him with fear that the whole thing would fall to pieces and bury him.

  He’d gone there after his father made him whip his mother before everyone. He’d gone first to his father’s tent and taken his father’s gun.

  He’d found his father kneeling on the floor. He’d never seen his father on his knees before, or after. The Christian Book lay on the ground next to him. His father read it aloud, and Alamayou understood that to his father, the words had to be more than thought. They needed to be set loose, to live in the world.

  “Stop talking to your god,” Alamayou had told him, “and tell me why you made me hurt her.”

  His father hadn’t turned at his son’s voice.

  “I brought your pistol, abat. Let’s see how well I’ve learned from you.”

  “If you’re going to kill a man,” his father said, “you should just kill him. You don’t bluster about it and speak doomfata. Not until it’s done. Now, come. Do it where my men can see what sort of prince I’ve raised. My army will be your army when I’m dead. Let them respect their ras.”

  Out on the field, one of the other generals brought his father a spear and a horse. “Gugs,” his father told him. “A man’s game. Remember the day I taught you? Bring a horse for my son!”

  A soldier brought him a horse and he mounted, gun in hand. There was nothing beneath him but a goatskin and the torqued back of the animal, a brown and white of delicate beauty that had been covered in bright streaming ribbons, as colorful as his mother’s shammas.

  They moved to opposite ends of the field from each other as horses and soldiers made way for them. “She’s my wife!” his father roared at him across the distance. “I’ll do as I please with her! A man would know that. A man would be concerned with being the son his father wants, not a gbra sadom. A monster. That’s what you are!”

  “She would love you,” he cried in response, “if you were like me.”

  The world reeled away from him as their horses charged at each other. He raised his gun, knowing that his doomfata words had leveled the ground between them in a way the English never could.

  Around them, everyone stared as he raised his father’s pistol. His hand shook violently. “Fari!” his father screamed at him. Coward. “Come! Ride at me until I’m dead.”

  He spurred his horse to go faster, his father’s words in his head. Ride, don’t stop until one of us is dead.

  But he didn’t believe those words. He hoped like a child that he’d ride and his father would just vanish, and the fortress and soldiers with him. The world would be a flat plateau and he would continue across it.

  His pistol dropped. It wasn’t rage that sent him headlong, but surrender. Not every man is brave, he’d thought, and not every man goes home.

  His horse flew past his father’s. He couldn’t shoot. His father’s spear caught him full in the chest, knocking him to the ground.

  His father leapt off his own horse and pounced on him. His eyes were filled with blood and hate. He’d pounded his son with his fists. He’d said, “Die. Die.” Each blow started further and further away until he’d felt nothing at all. He’d only heard the sound of his father screaming doomfata over him.

  Alamayou shook his head violently, dispelling the memory of his father beating him. The colored glass of the tiny church had grown dark. The light was too low for him to see inside anymore. It was getting late, and he knew the royals wanted to leave.

  So do I, Alamayou thought as he returned to the carriage. It’s time to be anywhere but where I am. In my past.

  §

  That evening, Alamayou and Philip went to the State Dining Room where they were seated across from the prince, princess, and Corbould. The service filled the long table with roast game, fish, and tourines of beef broth while the royals engaged in a conversation of no importance. No one talked about rumors, scandals, or power struggles.

  The princess expressed her love of travel, to Corbould’s great fascination. “Certainly,” she said, “our mother’s fondness for Scotland is all too well-known.”

  “Mrs. Brown and that rot,” the prince remarked as the service cleared dishes.

  “We’re disallowed friends,” the princess said, glancing at Corbould, “as if a near decade doesn’t sufficiently demonstrate loss or love.”

  The servants of the dining room brought in platters on a metal web, each its own terrace of finger cakes.

  “I’ve become enamored with France,” she continued as plates were set and cakes served with pearl-and-silver tongs. “I know it interests mother immensely, too.”

  “I’ve never been to Paris,” Prince Leopold said wistfully. “How I would love to see it.”

  “There are villages by its sea,” Corbould said. “Monaco, Nice. Villefranche. Quite lovely and restful. Maybe when the rest of what presses your majesties is past, you can all go.”

  “Maybe you could show us your favorite places there,” the princess said.

  “I’d be honored.”

  This, Philip thought, is how people are at wakes. They eat and drink and talk in corners about something, or out in the open about nothing, and all the while the reason for the gathering is never spoken out loud.

  He could feel his anger rise together with his fear. The queen had spared him for Seely, and for that alone he ought to have been relieved. I should be grateful, he thought bitterly, and go pen a note of slavish thanks to her. But Seely hadn’t been spared, no matter the princess’s reassurances at the carriage. What sort of life was she headed for? She was an African bound for God knew where. She couldn’t be anything but a nursemaid or a nanny to a family. A decent one, he hoped, with a father not intent on making a bellywarmer of her. They would be reputable. They would be white. And that meant that Seely would be alone again, with no one there to see whether the queen’s promise of a better life was kept.

  He ate a bit of fish even as his stomach soured. He was safe, for at least one more day. Alamayou was safe, at least until the queen made her wishes known. There was no place for what he was feeling. But that was exactly the problem, wasn’t it? No place.

  “What’s wrong?” Alamayou whispered, and Philip turned to him with a weak smile. How far you’ve come with your words.

  “Nothing. Thinking about the zoo, and how nice it was.”

  Seeing that Alamayou wasn’t convinced, Philip added, “I guess I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop on us.”

  He laughed when Alamayou looked up at the ceiling, frowning. Having that between them made him feel less foreign and alone.

  Simon came to the doorway of the room, hands clasped. He waited for the royals to recognize him. Prince Leopold motioned for him to enter.

  “Her Majesty asks that you join her,” he told them.

  “Where are we gathering?” Prince Leopold asked.

  “She has requested that you come to the Blue Room.”

  “Extraordinary.”

  The prin
ce placed his napkin atop his plate and got up, making heavy use of his cane for support. Leaning forward, he blew the table candles out.

  Alamayou and Philip followed him to the door. Alamayou paused, waiting for the princess to follow them.

  She rose with Corbould into the shadows of the State Dining Room. She silently mouthed words to Corbould and Corbould responded in kind. They smiled at each other, their eyes locked.

  Alamayou looked away. What passed between them belonged to them only and needed to stay where he’d found it. Out of the light of Windsor.

  §

  The queen sat in a modest chair in the Blue Room, near the hearth. Spent wood still threw off heat and soft orange light. Six more chairs had been arranged in a semicircle for Alamayou, Philip, the prince and princess, her secretary, and Lord Grant.

  They all sat before her, uncertain and silent.

  “Lock the door behind you,” she instructed Simon. “Be sure the corridor is kept clear until we advise you otherwise. No one is to come near. Nothing we speak of ever leaves this room unless we bless it. Not even the outcome. Our notes of this will be sealed.”

  Simon did as he was told. The door locked and the sounds of his shoe heels faded away.

  “We have made our decision,” the queen said. “While we are certain you have opinions and advice for us, we wish to tell you, our decision is a final one.”

  Jesus, Philip thought, look at her. Look at her eyes, for the love of God. It’s as if she wants to bloody hide from us. She’s doing it. She’s sending him back.

  He forced himself to remain calm. He was in the most intimate, the most secret place of this queen’s rooms, and if he didn’t will himself to sit and wait to hear her say it out loud, he’d leap up and take Alamayou, break down her locked door, and run. Just like you once thought of running, Alamayou, until it all burns away and then we’ll be home.

  Alamayou saw it, too. In the queen’s pale, still face, he saw the possibility of his death in Abyssinia, and he wasn’t sorry for any of it. Not for telling her of his life before Windsor or of his true heart. He had been given days after the fire, after the rail. It hadn’t all ended. That meant something.