The Eyes of a King (41 page)

Aldebaran laughed, then stopped. “That is not Shakespeare,” he said. “That is one of our poets.”

“Diamonn,” said Ryan. He set aside the picture. “Uncle, what does this mean? All of this.”

Aldebaran sat down opposite him. “I will communicate with the leaders of the resistance. I will suggest that the plans for revolution should be brought forward. We have the silver eagle; I think that the power in it could carry an exile like you home; Lucien’s government is in crisis. There is no better time than now to think about going back.”

“Going back?” said Ryan. “Is this your grand plan? That just when I become attached to this country, we leave it forever?”

Aldebaran handed him a book. “Read this,” he said. “These are the latest reports from the city. Things are growing serious. Perhaps we should set aside astronomy and archery and concentrate on the current situation.”

Ryan took the book in silence. Aldebaran went to his desk but remained standing, looking into the empty glass case in front of him. “What can I do?” he said eventually. “You have to return, Ryan. We cannot stay here forever. And yet—”

“Uncle, I know,” said Ryan, opening the book.

Anna did not sleep easily that night, without the necklace in her hand. She tried to imagine her old life at home: waking at five, hearing the traffic already whining, and practicing before school out on the playing fields, because more than anything she wanted to be a dancer. That old life seemed distant now. But when she slept eventually, she dreamed of the same things, as though nothing was different: her family gazing up at her while she danced across a stage edged with white lights. She could see them all, the relatives she knew and the shadowy man
and child who were always there. Only this time those two faces were clear. The husband’s face was Ryan’s, and the child had his eyes.

T
hat Sunday morning I woke early. I could not sleep for the weight on my heart. It was still pitch-dark. I was sure that I had dreamed something, but I didn’t know what it was, and it was gone as I tried to catch it. It was quiet as the grave that night, silent as the cool, lifeless earth deep down where no sound of the living can reach. It was so silent that I could not think. Then, slowly, the noise rising like the footfalls of a stealthy army in the dark, it began to rain.

That afternoon it was still raining hard. The streets were streaming with mud and almost deserted. No one would go out in such weather. Except soldiers. They were the only ones who passed. I sat at my bedroom window, watching the rain and thinking of nothing. There was nothing to do, and I couldn’t concentrate anyway. I would read the same sentence of the newspaper ten times, without understanding it. I could hear Maria and Grandmother talking in the living room, the low rise and fall of their voices, but I did not want to be with them either.

I thought I might visit Stirling’s grave. I put on my overcoat and went into the living room. “You are not going out in this weather?” said Grandmother, following me with her eyes as I searched for the keys. I nodded. “Where are you going?”

Maria was beside her at the table, her hand resting on
Grandmother’s arm. “Here,” she said, and handed me a piece of paper.

The graveyard
, I wrote.

“You will get ill, going out in the rain,” said Grandmother. “You will get very ill. And there are soldiers about even though it is Sunday; there must be something wrong. Leo, stay in the house.” Her voice was quavery and tearful. She caught hold of my arm. “Please, stay here.”

I shook my head and went to the door. “I think he will be all right, Mrs. North,” said Maria. “It is not cold outside, and it looks as though the rain will be stopping. Would you like me to build up a fire anyway, for when Leo gets back?”

Grandmother nodded and grasped Maria’s hand. While they were laying out the coal in the grate, I left. I hurried down the stairs and out into the street. It was something to do, walking, and it made the pain in my heart duller and easier to bear. And I would rather be standing in the rain beside Stirling’s grave than trying to read the newspaper again and again while the silence made my head ache.

As I started along the side of the square, two soldiers stepped out of a doorway. “Where are you going?” said one. I did not reply. “This area is closed for an important military operation,” he said. “Did you not hear the announcements? Did you not read the newspapers?” I made to carry on walking. They did this sometimes, but I was not going back home because they told me to.

They glanced at each other uncertainly; then one of them caught my arm. “Unless you are going directly back to your house, you should not be out here,” he said, struggling to keep hold of me. “If we see you again, you will be escorted back with
an official warning.” He pushed my arm roughly and let me go. I could feel their eyes on me as I went on.

In the next street I met two others, and three more in the next. These three would not let me carry on toward the graveyard. They stood in front of me until I turned back the way I had come.

I was suddenly tired, and I did not have the strength to go on. I sat down in the doorway of a house and rested my head on my arms. A moment later someone was tapping on the window—a wealthy-looking woman, glaring at me for sitting on her doorstep. I got to my feet again.

I walked a couple of streets farther, then sat down under the high wall of the locked Royal Gardens. The rain was running down my face but I did not care. I sat and closed my eyes and wished for the hundredth time that Stirling was with me. Stirling would not stand for this desperation. He would have said something to bring me back. I could not tell myself those things.

Sitting there with my eyes closed, I began to see a hill where the sun was shining, and the girl Anna and the prince. I had been a hundred miles from thinking of these things, and they were suddenly in my mind, as though someone else had put them there. I stood up and looked around, then thought of the book and took it out of my pocket. It was in two halves now—two shabby leather covers with loose pages between them.

What was the use of fairy tales and dreams now that Stirling was gone? This book could not bring him back. I was suddenly angry with it, this book that had told us all kinds of meaningless lies about a country that did not exist. Aldebaran was dead; we had no English relatives; the prince had been shot
ten years ago. And yet this strange story was still haunting me and I could not shake it off.

I drew back my arm and hesitated for a moment. And then I threw the book with the last strength I had, over the fence into the Royal Gardens. I heard the pages scatter among branches, with a sound like a bird’s wings, and then silence.

That was it; the story was gone. I turned and walked home.

A
ldebaran was gazing out the window without seeing the English sunlight. His mind was on his homeland, and the rain falling there, and his English family, who he could barely see. And a black book. He did not notice that Ryan was gone.

Anna was cleaning one of the guest rooms when through the window she saw Ryan approaching. She left the bed half made and ran down to the yard. “You should not have come here,” she said, stopping in front of him.

“I had to see you.”

“Aldebaran made you promise to stay in the house. Ryan—”

He caught hold of her hands. “It will be all right.”

Monica was calling to Anna from somewhere in the building. Anna glanced at him, and they started across the lawn, away from the hotel, toward the waterfalls. “Even so,” said Anna. “What happened before to make you so frightened? Did you say they sent soldiers here?”

He hesitated, then spoke. “They came to the house; I don’t know how. Talitha must have arranged it. I was only a little boy. Aldebaran hid me out in the ruined chapel and told me to wait for
him there. A day I waited, and half the night, before I went back. He was lying on the floor, very sick. I thought that he was dead. I thought that I had lost him as well….” He stopped. “I almost did. But the next day he was sitting up in bed, telling me that Talitha could never really harm him, and I chose to believe that. They worked together for thirty years in the secret service, years ago, before I was born. Perhaps it was true what he said. Perhaps he knew her too well to be defeated by the things she thought of.”

They started up the shaded path beside the waterfalls. “Why didn’t they look for you?” said Anna.

“It was a clever prophecy that Aldebaran wrote. Those who believe it will not risk harming me because Aldebaran said that the same harm would fall on them. And besides, the revolution is Aldebaran’s plan; he is the powerful man and the leader of the resistance. He is the one they want. I am just there to fulfill the prophecies he has written. Do you see what I mean?”

Anna was glancing back through the trees. “What is it?” Ryan said.

“I don’t know. I thought I saw something.” She shook her head and they turned and walked on. “But what did you want to talk to me about?”

He folded his arms and unfolded them, then ran his hand through his hair. “I wanted to speak to you without Aldebaran there,” he said, half smiling. “I hardly seem to have the chance now. Listen, Anna—”

She glanced back down the hill again. “Did you hear that?”

There was a silence. They could hear nothing. “Anna, are you listening to me?” said Ryan. “Here, this is what I came to give you. Take it.” He put something into her hand. It was a folded sheet of paper.

Anna turned back to him and opened it. On the page was a
drawing. A portrait of her. She stared at it in silence, tracing the pencil lines. He was watching her carefully. “What do you think?”

“How do you know my face so well?” she said, looking up at him.

He laughed quietly, as though that was obvious. “Anna, I came here to tell you—” And then he stopped. There was someone standing on the path behind her, in the shadow of the rocks.

Anna turned. In the silence of the English wood, Ahira and Ryan stared at each other. Another man stepped out of the shadows—the younger soldier from the square. The third was a stranger with bristly blond hair, also in blue uniform. All of them were armed.

“Ahira,” said Ryan, reaching for Anna’s hand but missing it. His eyes were on the soldiers. In another second, the man with the scar across his face had a pistol out.

“Don’t move,” he said.

Ryan moved anyway, suddenly, toward Ahira. The blond man shouted something. There was a thud. Then Ryan was on the floor, blood running from his forehead. Ahira stood still, the pistol still raised from bringing it down on Ryan’s head.

Anna dropped the picture and stumbled toward Ryan, but the blond man caught hold of her and bent her arm back so that she could not move. The youngest man fell to his knees. “What the hell did you do that for? Do you know who the boy is? If you’ve killed him—”

“Shut your mouth,” said Ahira. “Get up. Stop wailing and get up.”

“He’s just unconscious!” said the man who was holding Anna. He was tying her hands, and every time she struggled, he smacked her hard across the head. “If you make a sound, I will shoot you,” he said.

“What are you doing?” said Ahira. “Why are you tying her up? Darius, what—”

“This is the girl. She has the silver eagle.”

“Let go of her!” Ahira raised his voice. “Of course Aldebaran would not be so stupid—”

“ We will have to take her,” said the young man. “She will go to Aldebaran if we leave her. Sir, we should go now, while Talitha can let us back through. I do not like this place, and you should not have harmed the boy—”

“Go, then,” said Ahira, turning away from him. “Darius, take the girl with you.”

The man still had hold of Anna’s wrists. He adjusted something on his pistol and put it to the side of Anna’s head. “Do not speak, please,” he said. “Walk quickly. Do not look back.”

Aldebaran came back from his thoughts “Ryan?” he said. There was no answer. He got up from his desk and went to the door of the library. “Ryan, come here!” he called more loudly.

He was troubled suddenly. He went through the house calling Ryan’s name, then took his keys and started out along the road. He climbed over the wall and ran up through the wood, toward the waterfalls. By the time Aldebaran reached where Ryan lay, Ahira had gone. And the others were in the ruined chapel, quickly leaving England behind.