The Eyes of a King (48 page)

The doctor put a hand on Monica’s shoulder to quiet her, then leaned over to speak to Anna. “Do you remember what happened?”

Anna glanced at Ryan, and he repeated his story. “Is that right?” said the doctor. Anna nodded. The doctor frowned but she did not argue. She examined Anna’s cheek for a moment in silence. Ryan caught Anna’s eyes, then glanced away.

“Strange,” the doctor said then. “These grazes are all the same. They look almost like—I don’t know. I would have said gunshot wounds.”

The great Aldebaran, walking over the hills in the early sunlight, looked back for a moment toward the town where the hospital stood. And then he started up through the trees, toward the old stone circle, where once he had opened his eyes to a strange country. As he walked, he stopped hearing the birds singing and the wind that ran through the trees. Ahead he thought he could hear other faint sounds—voices in the air, speaking in an accent that he recognized. And England, like a dream or a nightmare, began to fade around him.

I
sat down on the step outside the door of Maria’s apartment. It was very early in the morning the day after I shot Ahira. The sunlight was slanting through the high window of the stairwell, and I sat and watched it. After a while, the door opened. “Leo!” It was Maria’s voice. I turned slowly. Grandmother was beside her.

“We were so worried,” Grandmother began, taking my hand. “Were you out in the city, Leo? Did you hear the gunshots?” She hugged me to her briefly; then Maria helped me to my feet. “Things will be better,” said Grandmother. “I will bake a loaf of bread, and you can go down and fetch the water for tea. Things will be better from now on.”

I knew they would not. But just knowing that left me with a strange kind of calm. It seemed a stupid lie to meekly help her home after what I had done, but I took her arm anyway and we started down the stairs.

I
watch the last lights burning in the city. It is almost dawn now, but the daylight holds off awhile longer. I go to the parapet and stare at the lights, imagining the people in those houses—all the thousands of people—sleeping now, or calling good night to their families, or pouring a last drink and sitting down to talk. Are any of them awake now because their hearts are troubled? Perhaps. I cannot tell. I turn the last pages of the book, but for a moment I cannot read on.

After I had got that far with the story, I decided not to tell you much more. I was exhausted with telling you this history and remembering these things. What happened in the days after I came back? I cannot remember exactly. Some of it is still clear; other parts I have lost entirely. I know that I tried to act as if things were normal. Real life pulled me back in, and I didn’t know what else to do. I told no one and went back to Grandmother and Maria.

If I had carried on despairing every minute of each day, it would have been easier to stand than that normality. I was ashamed to live, the same way I would feel ashamed to be one of the people sleeping guiltlessly in those houses, or to have gone down and danced in the bright rooms below. I have no right. It is hard to justify my crime to you. All I can say is that I am paying for it.

My story goes on—but not yet. I will read about the others first.

A
nna woke suddenly. She was shivering as she had on that dark balcony above the city. The clock on the other side of the lake was chiming two. A breeze caught the curtains and made them rise and fall. She picked up her necklace from the table. She had slept all that day and most of the night, but now she was awake and breathing fast.

“Anna?” said a voice outside her door then. It was Ryan. “I heard you call out. Are you all right?” She turned on the lamp and got up to unlock the door. Ryan was there in the dark corridor, dressed and with a book in his hand. “My room is across from yours,” he said. “Listen, Monica will be angry if she hears us
talking at this time of night. I just wanted to check nothing was wrong.”

“Come in for a minute.”

She shut the door behind him. “Thanks,” he said. “She does not even like me staying here; I don’t know what she would say if she thought I was disturbing the paying guests.”

“You are a paying guest yourself,” said Anna. Aldebaran had insisted that Ryan leave the house while he was gone, in case it was still watched, so he had come to Hillview.

He sat on the chair beside the bed. Still blinking in the lamplight, she wrapped the blanket around her shoulders and went to shut the window. “A storm is getting up out there,” said Ryan. “Was that what woke you?”

She shook her head. “It was just a nightmare. I didn’t like being in that hospital. It reminded me of …” She shrugged. “Other times. Sorry if I woke you.”

“I was not asleep. My uncle has left me with enough work for a year. Politics and laws, and I have to know them. He is not too far away to check up on me.”

She sat back down on the bed. He reached out briefly and took her hand, then let it go again. “Things will be different from now on,” said Anna. “I will practice dancing harder than ever. I could have died, and I didn’t. Do you know what I mean?”

“I know.” He closed the book in his hands and set it down on the floor, then leaned forward in his chair and watched her.

“What is it?” she said.

“Anna, are you all right now? When you were in Malonia—I don’t know—it must have been frightening. Is that what you dream about? Is that what gives you nightmares?”

She pulled the blanket tighter around her. “Maybe it is that, partly. In the daylight I had almost forgotten. But when I fell to sleep, I could see it again. I could see all their faces as if I was really there. It was more real than a dream.”

Ryan nodded. “After I was exiled, I used to dream that I was back there. I used to see my mother and father again and think, Just give me five more minutes and it will be real—I will get back home somehow, back to how things used to be. But I never had five minutes more; I always woke.”

There was a silence. Ryan looked away then. “I was thinking about Talitha today,” he said, in a different tone. “The revolutionaries have captured her and she will be imprisoned for life. One of my duties will be to publicly sentence her, as one of the first criminals convicted during my reign. An old tradition.”

“You will be responsible for that?” said Anna.

“I will be responsible for many things. I am scared to think too much about it. I cannot speak judgment on one of the great ones, even her. She is a very famous woman, and she frightens me, in spite of her beautiful face.”

“She is young,” said Anna. “I thought you said she worked with Aldebaran in the secret service.”

“No, she is his same age, or a year older. Talitha is very powerful, and the signs of age are easy to prevent if you choose to do it. Even Aldebaran does, I think—not much, but you would not say that he was seventy.”

Ryan folded his arms and looked out at the moon lying silent over the hills. “Aldebaran thinks that the mistakes of the old government are what we must learn from now. Talitha was not wise enough. Lucien was not admired. And they were too personally involved.” He shook his head. “He has surrounded me with
prophecies and myth and set me up as a lonely figure. The opposite of what Lucien was. I hope it will work, but—” He turned to her. “Sometimes I wish I was an English boy. I have been separated from everyone, even here in England. And now I have you, and everything has changed. I don’t want to be a leader. Sometimes I don’t even think I believe in those things. But all I am doing is stepping into a place set up for me. Do you see what I mean?”

“Yes, I see. Have you talked to Aldebaran?”

“I cannot change anything now. But even so, I am more glad than I can say to be able to talk to you like this.” He got up then and went to the window. “Anna, shall I stay here until you fall asleep? Let me do that; I don’t mind.”

“All right. Thank you.”

After a while had passed, she said, “Lucien looked like you. I never told you.”

Ryan smiled sadly at that. “Aldebaran says he looked more like me than my father did. That is how life goes.” He shook his head. “The whole thing is strange. If I had lived here in England a few more years, I would really have begun to think that the rest was just a dream.”

“L
eo, what are you doing?” said Grandmother. It was afternoon, I could tell from the light, and I was sitting on the window-sill as I used to do often. And I was writing. “I thought you were asleep,” she said. “What are you writing about?”

I did not know. I had been asleep, but now I was writing in the margin of the newspaper, as though I had something urgent to set down. And the handwriting did not look like my own. It
looked like the mysterious writer’s—the great one who Stirling and I had spent so long talking about, the one who had written in that book that I’d thrown away. I turned the pages, startled. I had written all kinds of things. The names stood out from the rest—Aldebaran, Ryan, Anna.

I folded the pages and put them in the windowsill chest without reading them. All that time I had been frightened that someone was trying to communicate with us—a powerful great one, even Aldebaran himself. I did not know what to think now. Was that all the great mystery was, the mystery that had sustained us through Stirling’s illness and carried me home from Ositha? Just a story I had written because I was desperate and haunted by strange dreams? I realized that the last of the magic had drifted away. I found I didn’t care.