Square Wave

by Mark de Silva

  Knox leafed through the pages and his shipmate wondered if he would go through the same stages he himself had, now almost fifteen years ago, when the monk had given him the book: whether the surge of awe and gratitude would be overtaken by a stubborn sense of smallness.

  But Knox’s eyes never lost their wideness. Immediately Knox’s father came to Rutland’s mind, the fevered one, delirious in his last days, talking mostly in Biblical snatches to his son and his earthly keepers, the two Sinhalese. They seemed to be the last fully formed sentences he possessed, at least the last of any complexity. It was as if their syntactic force, or else the depth of their entrenchment, had equipped them to crowd all else out of his mind. To Rutland this seemed an elevation of the Book at a cost to the man’s psyche, or else just the reverse.

  He could see that Knox was also thinking of him, the old man endlessly apologizing for bringing his son along on this unholy “mission of exchange.” They were exchangers, Knox Sr. had said.

  Sitting on the floor across from Knox, Rutland undid his boots, the leather rough and cracked. Knox started reading out passages of the Bible, lines his father had fixed on, near death and long before, back in England; lines he wanted to deliver now to his dead father, to Rutland, to all three of them. Each page was a trigger. On seeing the first few words, or even just the arrangement of the page, taking it in with a sweep of his eyes, the rest of the passage would follow like a stream. He would intone the words he saw in his mind, his eyes floating up to the other end of the house, the wall, the door, or the window, but never to Rutland.

  Then he would turn a few of the supple vellum sheets—what merchant was missing this now?—take in another page, the flow and frame, and light on another line. Rutland hadn’t been much moved on seeing many of these lines himself, but he was moved by the effect they had on his friend.

  Knox set the book down on the trunk and sat in silence. The flask of arrack shone in the light of the candle. Rutland took it to his lips but only a trickle of spirit remained, just enough to numb his tongue. Knox excused himself with a half-hearted wave, taking the Book with him into his room, which left Rutland to watch the tallow burn.

  III.

  Scabbarded men stood along the edges of the main hall, facing its walls like dunces in a room with too few corners. They’d each slipped a stopper out, eye-level and wide as a face. Through these gaps in the wall they looked out into the torch-lit court. Along the thick outer-court walls, in the hollow spaces scattered throughout, another set of men positioned themselves the same way, facing out into the broader village, where conversations were had, trade was conducted, life was lived.

  Then there were the roamers, and sometimes he, Rajasingha, was one of them. Only the very closest to him knew. On these nights, his face was darkened a shade, and his locks, usually pristine, were made stringy and left to hang haphazardly around his ears, like an old warrior’s. The king would be clothed like the middling ranks of the court (he had several swords marked with the shields of modest nobility).

  Only after he’d officially retired to his quarters, not long after dark, would he begin his walk. Two guards stood by his chamber doors as he wandered the court, the night’s gossip begun. He talked to no one, only listened, and if called out to, or interrupted, he pretended not to hear, and sometimes not to see.

  His purpose was, primarily, ostensibly, security. From his watches and guards much intelligence came to him, but the mediation introduced impurities. Depending on the messenger, the information would be colored in one way or another, and this was not always, or even often, intentional.

  He was sure there was much that was being misapprehended, when it wasn’t simply missed altogether. It wasn’t arrogance or vanity that made him think few of his officers could hope to see as he did. Keeping his kingdom alive this long, through the many years of tumult, coming from all directions, within and without, demanded an otherworldly sense for tone, for gesture: a capacity to see the future in things.

  He didn’t acquire this sense through ruling. It came first, and it was what marked him as a ruler, the almost disinterested pleasure he took, even as a child, in understanding the effects of his actions: what would become, when he no longer needed a guardian and ascended to power, the ripples of his rule. A king had to take this relish, directed to no end, to stay king.

  Nearly every night-walk shuffled the order of faith he had in the great nobles of the court. There were, in truth, many in the middle who neither rose nor fell much, being neither confidants nor traitors. But some near the lower margin, the threshold, would rise high up into safer territory, sometimes to a place that made them for a time unimpeachable. Others would fall from these heights to somewhere near the margin. The problem only occurred when a great man already near the margin fell, thereby crossing the threshold.

  Reasons would then be found. When treason could be imputed, the execution was public. When the case was harder, a vanishing followed. Sometimes this was an exile; usually it was a private execution.

  There were a very few cases, no more than half a dozen, where, owing to discoveries made about the man, usually during a later watch, either by the watchmen or the king himself on one of his night-walks, a noble who had fallen below the threshold would right the wrong that had caused the fall before it was feasible to have him disappeared or killed. Curiously, none of these men ever fell out of the king’s graces again.

  Against the wishes of his aides, Rajasingha would pass the inner wall of the court and roam the village, a less manicured space, freer in form, centerless and so more hazardous. Here he would stroll through the lanes and splitting byways on which the village houses and markets were arranged. His stride would shorten, or he would pause altogether, and by his expression pretend to decide whether to enter a shop, say, or take a rest on a rock.

  When they’d started these watches, soon after the rebellion, Rajasingha frequently heard unflattering things said about his rule. But open criticism soon disappeared after the watches began, as the Court always seemed to know what the people said or did, even in private.

  Dissatisfaction fell away into code. A second language, compounded out of the first, in which hybrids of existing phrases, placed back to back, came to mean something else, took hold in the kingdom. Everyone was soon bilingual at least.

  When this tongue drew notice—the watches grew bilingual too—these sentiments were shunted into gestures, looks. But from the many eyes of the king these were no safer. Use of these codes and gestures, when discovered, led to various sorts of seizures, always disguised, tailored to the circumstance, and laced with the moral significance, the cruel wit, of parables. A man’s yard might be taken for use by the state in the cultivation of a public garden, if he’d been found to have complained, in the wrong tones, about the condition of the village. Cattle might be led away on an alleged suspicion of disease—for the king’s use if they were grand, to slaughter and destruction otherwise—if the grievance concerned inadequate supplies of water or cattle feed, which were regulated by the councilors. Or a son might be conscripted for a servant’s role in the temple if a family’s objection was to the coziness between royals and monks.

  Repercussions could be more serious, if the king was in the mood: the destruction of crops on which taxes had failed to be paid in full, apparently through natural disaster, but in reality through localized flooding in the night. Or something as simple and devastating as the outing of a couple having an affair, as the king, though estranged from his own wife, was faithful still, and held fidelity in high regard.

  To some villagers and townsmen, this was all the simple meting out of justice, and a miraculous one at that. It seemed to them that the king really was a god now, so much did he know about their lives. Their complaints stopped in all its forms. It was churlish and vain, they thought, to question the divine order, one that the king’s newfound omniscience gave them a greater faith in than ever before.

  Others, though, turned to a different kind of silence. Strict
ly faultless, always possibly meaningless, a mere lull in the conversation, silence was recruited to indicate unsayable points of dispute with the kingdom. What exactly the interlocutors took from these silences, what idea was ultimately exchanged, couldn’t be known. It was never used systematically enough for that, which made it safe from interception, from translation, by the king’s watches. In truth it was less an exchange than an improvisation, one man intuiting, with only silence as his guide, what was felt by another.

  IV.

  Dressed in the clothes of a European man he never met, whose fate he didn’t know, Rutland entered the royal martial quarters, a few miles from Digligy, and sat on the broad wooden bench near the door.

  There was Haas, captured in a night raid on a Dutch fort, smiling and chatting in his mother tongue with Van Holten, his comrade, who sat next to him with a swatch of cloth in his hand, polishing an already gleaming snake, the delicately wrought hilt of a longsword. There was Marco da Silva, heavily stubbled, black hair falling in rings down his bright collar, whistling a tune—trying, it appeared, to drown out the Dutchmen, if only in his own ears. Then there was Michel Veneres, pacing the room in high brown boots and a flowing vest that seemed to have tails, idly drawing his finger across the shields hanging from the walls.

  The room doubled as an armory. Some of the arms were European, some were local but forged in their style. Like Rutland, Veneres was a volunteer, an unlucky trader of a nation with no stake in the island, not a martial capture like the Portuguese or the two Dutchmen, though he’d committed some time ago to the group.

  It had been two weeks since, against Knox’s advice, Rutland agreed to join the European squads the king was assembling to train and lead his Sinhalese brigades. The Englishman and Frenchman, though traders only, were added to this, one of the lead squads, for the prestige, it was thought, of having all-European units.

  All of them had been in captivity on the island at least several years. None longer than Rutland, though, who’d been held almost two decades now. All knew some Sinhalese. But the Dutchmen knew more English than Sinhalese. The Frenchman knew more still. The Portuguese and the Englishman knew only their own languages. The group spoke an immature pidgin, still rough and prone to breakdown, drawn from these languages.

  They were given the finest arms in the king’s possession. Frequently this meant being reunited with their own or their brethren’s, the spoils of Sinhalese raids on their forts. Haas’s arquebus hung from the wall.

  Haas stood and greeted Rutland, though by this time he was already seated. The four of them, their glances happened to lock in a circle, two standing, two sitting, each one’s eyes on the next. The circle broke. Their eyes wandered again. The moment had served, though.

  Veneres paced and spoke to Rutland for the group, in fine English, about their treasonous task. With a hard-edged vagueness that astonished, he talked of difference, of sameness, of the future. These three together, he said, formed a dial, like the cindric mal, the flower clock used by the priesthood to time their chants, to bring them to a close, and to begin them again. The room fixed on Rutland, all but Veneres himself, who carried on fingering the arms.

  V.

  The king watched Rutland walk away, finely outfitted, his gilt scabbard catching the light, with a royal message for Knox. Rajasingha found himself on the cusp of a clearing, a new era, built on the backs of Europeans: four squads of fair-skinned men, sent down the mountain in a false alliance with the imperialists. They’d be disguised as plunderers, marauders, and escapees of his kingdom, talking of inroads, of exploitable weaknesses in Digligy and Kandy. The king’s own men, dark-skinned, many dozens of them, steeped in ambush, would be trailing just behind, guns and swords leering from the shrubs, ready to pounce on the invaders.

  It would be the choice of Rutland and the others in these European squads. If they turned on the natives, and sided with their blood, they would be killed with the rest of the whites—first, in fact, as they were nearest the Sinhalese forces following behind. At the same time, retreat, if necessary, would still be possible for the king’s men. If, however, they remained loyal to the king, and Rutland and the others managed through their tales to disarm their own countrymen and convince them they were allies, victory would be simpler still. The reinforcing Sinhalese brigades, combined with the king’s European forces, would be too much.

  Tomorrow the king would meet with Rutland’s squad. He thought of the 547 lives of the Buddha. He wondered how many he himself had, and which one this was.

  VI.

  The light came only from stars, and the stars were weak, so it fell just short of the world, leaving it visible but not quite seen, everything bathed in graphite blue. They’d arrived at the outer wall at the back of the palace. It was formed of rough-hewn stone drawn from the thickly forested valley they’d just crossed in the night.

  Da Silva tested his grip on the wall. A rustling was heard. He lifted himself up off the grass. Haas signaled for him to wait till Van Holten and Veneres emerged from the brush—at the last minute, Rutland had abandoned the plan—but whether he understood or not, he began to climb. He had no sword, just a wide, short blade in his boot whose hilt rose up to Haas’s face as he ascended. The temptation to pull da Silva off the wall passed, partly because Haas wasn’t sure he’d get the better of him. The Portuguese was agile, a master of weaponless combat, and good with a blade too. They’d found that out in training. Da Silva had the knife to Van Holten’s throat when Haas intervened.

  Da Silva stopped at the top without cresting the wall. The other men had collected at the bottom. Side by side, all but one started to climb. On the order of Veneres, the one playing watch at the base, they slipped over the top and into the darkness within.

  The limed walls of the palace proper shone blue-white, the stars sufficing only to bring light to things that gave all of it back. Veneres came over the wall and settled in the grass. Another rustling came. A snake perhaps.

  They saw no sentries at the back, at the two short palace doors. Above the doors, every few yards, there were black squares lining the wall. The king’s windows. Trees rose over the sides of the palace, twisting over the wall in both directions, creating broad patches of a slightly richer black in the yard.

  The men crept along the semicircular wall in the darkness that reigned at its edge, headed for those windows, the king. As they approached they made out a massive form a third shade of black within the trees ahead. They decided it was a boulder. Then it was rumbling toward them at speed, cutting through the tall grass, squealing like an elephant. One by one, the men found themselves overtaken as their own squeals joined its, as life, this life, was stamped out of them, expelled from their bones.

  VII.

  Mud and water waist-high, Knox and Rutland inched through the mangroves with their bags held over their heads, looking for a way back to London, and finally, in Rutland’s case, to Kent. His bag was heavier than it should have been, but the journals and papers counted for a lot. The last one that went in was Darasa’s note. It had been sealed with an inscrutable stamp when it arrived by messenger, and it suggested just enough about the king’s treacherous plans for the European squads, Rutland felt, to impel him to flee with Knox into the northern swamps, looking for their people’s vessels along the upper coastline, if they could make it that far this time.

  Rutland had delivered the king’s message to Knox, a spoken one, before Darasa’s arrived. Its complexion altered in the light, or perhaps the dark, of the monk’s note, as did the monk’s in its. In fact, Rutland had dispatched the very first of the three messages, to Darasa, about the circle of eyes he’d seen in the martial quarters. Now all their words could only be seen through the veils of the others’.

  Rutland had taken his letter to the temple himself, in the early morning. He gave Darasa the Bible back at the same time, the pages speckled with water stains, or tears, it appeared, and marked by Rutland and Knox at passages that might be of special use now to the monk. />
  What Darasa had made of the note, and of the markings, Rutland didn’t know. An exegete of his caliber had every chance of cracking it. Both their notes, in fact, provided for the possibility of discovery and, by those means, the forestalling of a connivance. But courage couldn’t really be ascribed to the authors of these letters, since to the extent their messages were recovered, a duty, one attending the knowledge so imparted, was shunted from writer to reader.

  It should be said, the king’s own message to Knox, in plain, bright language, yet so plain, so bright, it couldn’t be seen at all—Rutland and Knox never settled on an understanding of it—shared in this same negativity.

  ■■■

  Stagg searched the remaining paper-clipped bundles for one that might serve as an epilogue, or one that might be collided with the rest, to react it. But before he could choose, or choose to finish where he was, a strong, quick clapping, the work of a single pair of hands, came from the back. It was Kames.

  Soon there were other hands. The noise swelled. Judging by the space between Kames’s hands, the great width of his clap, it was his applause that was most vigorous. It was the kind reserved for finales, though, not intermissions. He might have been trying to save everyone from embarrassment, Stagg’s talk was so peculiar. And the crowd, bemused by the lecture, followed the director’s lead. Stagg couldn’t continue now, though perhaps he wouldn’t have wanted to. Kames might have understood all he needed to, about Stagg and his dividedness, and about himself. There was no need for endings.

  The director’s face was out of sync with his hands, though. It failed to express, or even simulate, quite the same pleasure. That didn’t mean he took none. He might have evinced another pleasure, or several even, but if so they were of subtler sorts, not the ones of airy eyes and upturned mouths, slightly ajar, with teeth shining within, also ajar. What else, besides pleasure, was in that face? Recognition, Stagg hoped. Kames more than anyone should know that in a scattered world, everything hinged on your capacity to put the pieces together.