by A. E. Shaw
Nishan halts his witterings mid-sentence as Eliza unbuttons and unlaces her uniform, pulling it off herself with increasing frenzy, as if she can’t get it away from her body quickly enough. Even the wash of air over her body is like a tonic. Then she’s standing in front of him, shaking the clamminess from her skin, and he turns away out of courtesy, assuming, correctly, that there has been a breakthrough of sorts and that, despite her obvious lack of interest in modesty, Eliza is highly unlikely to run naked through the corridors of the complex in a bid to escape.
Were Eliza of a mind to escape, she would do just that, letting nothing so inconsequential as nudity stop her, but she hasn’t come all this way to turn back at the last minute, and she hasn’t seen water this clear and inviting in a long time. Like all good soldiers and survivors, Eliza knows you take good food, good water and good rest where it comes, because you don’t know when your next opportunity for it might be.
Seeing Selina pull such grand reserves of courage from who knows where has more than pushed Eliza to try and pick up her ideas of herself. If a part of that means washing up and brushing up, well, with no immediate threat, that’s exactly what she’ll do. She had not expected Selina to assert herself thus, for Eliza had thought her quite the mouse, the pawn, the toy. If she will be more than that, then Eliza must find herself a stronger foothold. Given the other things Eliza has on her mind, she is grateful that someone else has stepped up to give her the time and space to compose her fury and create a plan of attack. The most important thing now is that she does not lose her place.
Gingerly, warily, she places her foot into the bath. It is blissfully, scaldingly hot. The heat freezes her with its ferocity and she pauses before continuing to push herself into the tub. Her skin both clears and darkens beneath the water.
“Is everything alright?” Nishan asks, still not looking at her.
“Yes,” Eliza replies. “Perhaps as I wash, you should keep talking.”
“What would you like to know?”
“I’d like to know what you know about all this.”
“All this?”
“This place. Your master. What this is. What you do.”
“I have no master.”
“Then what do you call Den Huo?”
“His Excellency? Why, just that. But he is not our master. We are all our own masters here.”
Eliza raises her eyebrows in surprise, and then slides momentarily beneath the water, letting the heat and comfort of it swipe her clean of the anger and irritation that every word from this man’s mouth causes her. It sounds so false. But she knows that it’s important to ground herself in what they know, so that she can gauge how they’ll react to what she does. There’s something behind his words that appears to creep and crawl into them, and, in hearing them, into her. These people, these fortunate, mindless people, they, too, are dangerous.
Rising back up, as the water pours and clicks from her ears, she hears Nishan is still speaking. “…we are privileged to live this side of society, at this time in the world, when things are better than they ever have been before, and when we have amongst us those that remember the terrible way that things were before.”
“And what terrible way was that?” Eliza asks, because surely they cannot be referring to the world she once knew, just days from these walls. That can’t be the ‘terrible way’, not when there was so much laughter there. This part of the world was the only one in all her travels that had ever felt at all like it might be home, as she flitted from family to family and was accepted by them all.
“Why, the way things were before. The crowding. The filth. The way the savages behaved. The danger, the illness, the horror.”
“And who told you of these things?”
“Why, those who came Inside from that time…” Nishan tails off. He finds Eliza difficult to read. Something in her voice sets his muscles on edge, as if she might at any moment tear down the walls and throw them all back Outside, back in time, back to those olden days he’s heard such stories of, where everything was fear and nothing was safe.
If she could, that’s precisely what Eliza would do. And even that, she thinks, would be more than they all deserve.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
The Dinner
The table is set. Everything is laid out, one plate at a time, for the grandest feast since the Coronation (which catered to every single person in this world, each and every one of them sharing out a year’s worth of intensively farmed food in one glossed twelve hour piece of theatrical celebration).
His Excellency sits already at the table’s head, watching and waiting as the servants present one dish after another. Each is held to him for approval - a silent yes/no given in the sweep of a hand towards the table, or away, out the door, feed yourselves with this, it isn’t right, or good, for this table. The logistics of the meal don’t occur to him, aren’t his concern, the purpose of this isn’t to feed anyone, no, nor to demonstrate his wealth and power, because in this world he no longer needs to do that: wealth and power is all there is, and all that exists is unquestionably his alone.
Outside, the light is seeping relentlessly from the sky. The inhabitants of the complex are silently, yet perceptibly, unsettled. They continue to go about their business, for it is all they know to do. Things are certainly not as they have been in the past.
His Excellency sups at the wine in front of him, fingers gripping the thread-thin beaten gold goblet so tight that it dents displeasingly, unattractively. As he waits, he works hard to rewrite history to fit these recent…developments. It mustn’t ever be the case that there are mistakes written into history, learnt by others, repeated, forever, of him.
In one sense, the waiting is the best part of it all. This is the part where His Excellency collects his thoughts and sets his story straight, breathing deep and arranging his bones so his posture is regal, his mind is completely clear.
Eliza, oh, Eliza…it’s beyond remembering, the last time His Excellency felt a thing in his heart (for pride, grandeur and excellence do not reside in the heart). Indeed (revisionist at work), it is Eliza who prompted him to rise to his position with such speed and decisiveness - she, she was the catalyst for it all. He would thank her, were it not that gratitude would diminish the legacy of his own greatness.
Yet even though Eliza has brightened him so, His Excellency has found himself fighting not to fixate on Aiden. The boy displays clear signs of his brilliant heritage, but is not what he ought to be. Did something happen when he left the castle? Might he have been in some way infected, ruined, by the ‘hermit’ he claims to have killed on the mountain? Shouldn’t that have made the boy resilient, rather than weak? After all, His Excellency’s own extraction left him with certain…characteristics, but in his case, they were perfect ones, ones that made him able to be the leader the world demanded. All Aiden appears to have learnt is how to be sullen, and small.
His Excellency wonders if the tutors let him down, but Eldringham was his own tutor first (and she never did tell Aiden that, isn’t that a character testament, that was never part of the arrangement, so see if you can work out for yourself why the woman entirely responsible for Aiden’s education would have chosen to keep him incurious, to deny him information about his father, his family, the world-as-it-was, maybe it’s something to do with whatever she did in the twenty years between teaching Den Huo, and her arrival into Aiden’s world…but then, that was her story, and it isn’t, in this book, anyway, ours).
His Excellency ponders the way Eldringham gave him precisely the kind of education that must always be valued: true academia, knowledge with that wonderful gloss of importance and presence wiped across its surface. She was always neutral, wise, and stern. She would never have set a foot wrong. Then, could it have been the others?
Michael, well, he was a quiet and willing expert with just enough technological knowledge required to run the early versions of the systems essential to the wellbeing of the castle’s inhabitants. He kindly and gr
acefully acquiesced to all Juan’s improvements, and allowed him free rein as and when it was required. When the time came for Aiden to be delivered to the castle, Michael submitted easily to all tests of his old age, demonstrating such simple, sweet, and absolute loyalty that there’s no logic at all to the idea that he’d have sabotaged the boy.
You might, here, see Den Huo’s own naiveté. There were no follow-up checks, no data reports, no site visits, there was no form of monitoring at all. San Huo, who never titled himself anything other than Leader, received regular reports on his son’s behaviour, his developing friendships with his companions, and on the boy Juan’s development of power systems and the surprisingly efficient growing and harvesting methods implemented under Michael’s quietly fascinated guidance. San Huo knew that his son was surrounded by brilliance and ambition, and he pulled the reins left and right as required to keep him learning, tested, growing, all the while. Den Huo didn’t know the extent to which he was ‘grown’, thus he never tried to apply the same methods to his own son. He simply had faith that Aiden was as he believed himself to have been: everything and more, innate, complete, immediate.
The backbone of this tiny universe, this over-constructed and mauled land, is faith in hierarchy. Considering that His Excellency committed the greatest ever betrayal of that faith whilst genuinely believing that he was behaving as a true Leader should, goes to show what a crumbling deck of lies their frail civilisation was built upon.
As the table is increasingly lost beneath shimmering golden platters of fruits and meats and bowls of soups and stews, so His Excellency feels himself relax into a state of mind appropriate for such a fortuitous day. No, it isn’t the way he’d imagined today - he’d anticipated another few rounds of pushing his son to be better - but now, now the world has given him a context in which to place Aiden. Just as San Huo could not have predicted his own son’s execution of a plan which was, in its initial stages, not the grand plan, nor the work of generations, as Den Huo has phrased it all this time, but a fatally-conceived last resort, one stem of a hundred-year-old brainstorm, stretching to save a rapidly degrading humanity from itself.
Truthfully, Den Huo’s godlike aspirations are far from those of his ancestors, whose attitudes have, contrary to the suggestions of the Book, ranged vastly, including the considerate and benevolent as well as the warmongering and vicious. With the rational application of facts, it isn’t so surprising that Aiden is not precisely what Den Huo expected. But there’s no room for rationale in Den Huo’s limited, confined, near-fictional existence.
When the table is complete, Tabatha appears at the doorway, peeking her head around, enquiring as to whether His Excellency is ready to receive her charge: he is, yes, but his face crumples into a snarl of disappointment: he’s disgruntled that this moment of reflection, preparation, anticipation is over.
Duly summoned, Selina enters the vast conservatory calmly, with great poise and a strong, set face. She is not at all thrown by the firelights’ dancing reflections on every piece of fine crockery, nor is she visibly awed by the sea of food before her. No, she plays her part perfectly, curtsies neatly, giving His Excellency something to smile at and prompting him into a slight check of his own posture.
He is relieved, reassured, that the girl has been conditioned into fine manners, and from the length and leanness of her physique, that she has clearly kept up the dancing, her dedication to which had her plucked from thousands to mix with his (then) most treasured possession. Now that she is cleaned, and dressed in a way he can both recognise and appreciate, it is clear to see that she is very much the realised version of the girl she was all those years ago. Perhaps, perhaps, as Den Huo calculates the wheel of chance that is genetics, perhaps she is worth saving after all. She is, to his knowledge (which is all that there is), the last dancer.
He greets Selina with a sliming warmth that makes her quail on the inside, but on the outside, she smiles, look she’s glad to hear his voice. He gestures to a seat, and she takes it, easily. She looks at the food, instead of him, though. That’s one strike.
When Eliza appears, it’s a shock to Selina. She is dressed in silk too, but in a ballgown, a fairytale dress, cut and shaped and flourished with fabric in all possible ways. Eliza has jewels of a hundred clashing colours placed all around her neckline, triangling down to her waist, and she sparkles her way to a chair, rainbows radiating from her body, throwing themselves across every surface. She’s barefoot (she looked at the shoes Nishan instructed her to wear and only laughed). Her hair is flat to her head so her cheekbones are prominent. Against her clean-washed hay-pale skin, her eyes glint rage.
Seeing Eliza like this, her shoulders back, face defiant, she looks like a different kind of human altogether. Not least because she looks, improbably, as if she belongs here. She matches the furniture, the decor, the scale of the place. The dress is merely the frame for her astonishing portrait.
“Eliza…” Selina breathes, and it’s more of a double-check. She doesn’t follow it up with is it really you, but she may as well have done.
“We are waiting only for my son, then,” His Excellency says, his lips curving upwards, and yet still not achieving a smile. “Please. Drink. The wine is good.”
This makes Eliza suspicious, but Selina less so, for as Aiden so often told her, wine is the liquid of conversation and the drink of kings and peasants alike (oh, that sort of talk sounded so normal, back then). Her glass is filled by a boy she hasn’t seen before, dressed in slim, but weighty burgundy fabric, as all the other servants here are. She swallows the thick red gloss hastily, even eagerly. It coats her throat and gives immediate warmth. For a second, this is pleasant, and then in the next second, she is wary of it. It is far thicker, far stronger, than the wine she is used to. And she remembers her company, the insanity of the man to her left.
Of course it would help His Excellency if she were in control of neither her words, nor herself. Of course. Given that she has eaten little, rested less, and has so much that must be either said or heard, she tries to check herself, and to resist the glass without plainly pushing it away. Small sips, she notes to herself, just enough. But oh, she’s hungry. And thirsty, too. Come on Aiden. It’s not like you to be late.
The three of them, plus the servant boy, who waits around as nervously as if this were the first day he has been called upon to serve (it is, it’s meant to emphasise that context thing), say nothing as they wait.
Eliza flicks her gaze from the table to Den Huo to Selina, building her fury, the sheer injustice of seeing more food than she has in her entire life set out on one table for less than a handful of people, but she keeps her wrath bottled up for now.
His Excellency is a great presence, both guests would concede, and it is easier, when in the lion’s den, to understand why so few question the way the lion would like his den to be run.
When Aiden finally arrives, his joy at getting to make a dramatic, anticipated entrance all but ruins his ability to do it. Still, he swishes his way in, shoulders back and chest thrust forwards. His Excellency frowns, for Aiden is increasingly distant from him. Look there: he seems to have all the requisite stature for the role, but then he lets himself and everyone else down with the details, the odd silences, the untimely collapse of his shoulders, and his complete disinterest in holding court. Say that to Selina, and she’d laugh, for that is not the Aiden she knows.
Then again, amidst a glass house, with a view far and clear, and everything in its right and proper place at last, what did they ever know of each other?
As His Excellency begins to speak, Selina can’t stop scrutinising him. He gestures wonderfully, fulfils the role of the king or great leader, just like those Aiden told her about, but also seems every bit as impossible and imaginary as the tales themselves. This man gives the impression that if you put a pin in him, he would burst into a shower of empty velvet and gold dust.
Eliza is fixated on His Excellency’s hands; broad, smooth, unblemished. Coward. His eve
ry word rings low in her ears, and she can barely swallow her drink, nor the enthusiastically presented salt fish that forms the first part of the first course. The fish is as tasteless as it is colourless, and the salt is harsh and swamplike.
Aiden is the only one of them to drink in his father’s words, and as each word slides into his ears, his stomach turns over, and over again. His fingers press at the cut of the diamonds at his throat until his fingertips are indented with their likeness. His father does not understand. He is talking of these wonderful things he has made, has done, of legacy, of how this world is better anyone ever dreamt it might be…inflated, dull brushes grating dry and malnourished against a miserable, boring landscape, in no way worthy of anyone’s inheritance.