The Secrets of a Fire King (30 page)

The plantation owner did all the talking. He explained to Muda that he had heard about the kris from a government offi cial. Did Muda know that his kris had probably belonged to a sultan’s wife, over one hundred years before? She was a devout woman, and wore it on a thin gold chain around her neck. According to the family story, she had lost it one day while crossing the river in a boat. It was a miracle, really, that it was found. Now, the kris belonged in a museum. It wasn’t as though Muda was giving it away, really. He could go to see it anytime. But this way others could see it too. They were sure he would want to share this kris. And it was, after all, a decree of the sultan.

Muda listened carefully, the kris resting in the palm of his hand as the man spoke. This kris was his, only his; that was something he knew. He thought about the way he had found it, how it had saved the gold fi elds for his village, how it had saved his life.

The thought that someone could come and take it made him burn inside, go breathless. He started to speak, but the words died in his mouth. It would do no good. A decree of the sultan was not something you could argue with. The kris would be taken regardless of what he said. And so, when they fi nally finished speaking, he did not say a word. He put the kris into the hand of the rich man, a
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hand that was soft and damp with sweat. Then he stood up gracefully and walked out of his house, but Khamina noted that for all his dignity the wild light had gone completely out of his eyes.

They had come in the gold car and Muda followed them as it left, walking steadily after the glimmering gold as it receded on the horizon. Even after it was long out of sight, the dust it had stirred up settling on the fruit trees, he walked. Finally all trace of the car was gone, and he squatted down on the side of the road in the shade. He tried to tell himself it was the divine will, but all the holy verses, even the one on the kris, which he had known in his fingertips, had fled from his mind. He sat like that, quite silent, in a vast emptiness. Across from him the golden dome of the mosque glinted in the midday sun, brightly, like a jewel.

In the Garden

Andrew Byar began his experiment in the garden, going out in the dusky evenings after the help had dis-persed for the day, after the cook had served the last meal and washed the china and departed to catch the fi nal trol-ley, after the gardener had arranged the tools in a gleaming, orderly progression against the shed walls, had carried the remnants of the weeding to the mulch pile at the edge of the grounds, and had tended to the orchids hung like lanterns from the trellis—

that was when Andrew Byar went outside, the house behind him lit like a great ship, his wife and grown sons moving through their evening rituals beyond the panes of glass.

It was June, the air fragrant with jasmine, honeysuckle, and mimosa. Catalpa blossoms burst like stars in the trees; their delicate custard scent infused the violent air. Andrew walked to the shed, stepping quickly, almost stealthily along the path, as if he were a thief and not the owner of these three verdant acres in the heart of Pittsburgh, high on a bluff overlooking the fl atlands on
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the opposite shore of the Monongahela River. There his steel plants roared all day and night, bright as beating hearts, glinting in the distance like piles of burnished coins.

At the shed door he turned on the flashlight and stepped into darkness rich with the scent of raw wood and linseed oil and fresh, damp earth. He made his way to the workbench. Beneath it, shoved in a corner, was a wooden crate once used to ship fresh persimmons from the sea coasts of Japan, now buried under blankets. Dust billowed in Byar’s narrow beam of light, and the smells of mildew and oil flew up as he dragged the crate to the middle of the room. He slid the lid off and groped inside for the strongbox hidden beneath a pile of old magazines, limp and yellowed. The box, smooth steel, was wrapped carefully in layers of oily rags, which fell in a soft pile by the polished leather of his shoes. He opened the latch with a tiny, intricate key he took from the inner pocket of his coat.

A ten-ounce bottle, fashioned of brown glass, was cushioned in a cloud of cotton. Ubiquitous, it might have held iodine, or smelling salts. Andrew Byar balanced his flashlight on the bench.

He took a test tube from his pocket and carefully poured a clear liquid from the bottle, filling the vial to a line marked near the top, then stoppering it with a cork. He put the brown glass bottle back into the box, nestled the box into the rags and beneath the wilting magazines, and slid the crate back to its position beneath the bench, the moldy blankets. Flashlight in one hand and the test tube in another, he went back outside, striding past the swimming pool and down the gravel path between the camellia bushes laden with rosy white flowers, until he came to the trellis where the orchids hung.

Here, he paused. From this clearing the house was visible only in pieces through the trees, magnificent elms and oaks and sycamores hundreds of years old, rare remnants of the virgin forests felled a century before to build the city. He stood watching for a moment, glimpsing the glassy light and shadowed brick amid the leaves, imagining his wife in her evening bath, plush towels on the floor of Italian marble and rose petals scattered on the water. Recently, her hair had begun to gray, and each week a
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stylist came to the house and left her gilded, as pale and ornately framed as a mirror. Still, in her expressions, her slowing movements, Andrew Byar faced his own age. His two sons were home from college for the summer, apprenticed to the steel factory, which he had built from nothing and through which he had made his fortune. They were indolent young men, handsome and spoiled, and he had no confidence in them. This summer they had brought friends, steady rivers of young men and women whose bright laughter flowed through the house, who studded the tennis courts with their flashing limbs and shouts, who draped themselves over benches, sofas, armchairs, who swam laps in the natural spring pool or splashed in the shallows or drank martinis at its edge. Andrew avoided them and slept poorly, waking from nightmares where his empire, built at such sacrifice and with such canny skill, constructed so painstakingly from the hours and sweat of his whole life, had been frittered into nothing as they played.

The test tube in his hand had warmed until it seemed to give off its own heat. Andrew held it up, trying to discern if a faint glow came from within, or if this was merely a trick of the scarce evening light. The single brown bottle hidden in his shed had cost more than his pool, more even than the private train carriage fitted out with velvet and gold in which he traveled to New York City once a month. Yet if this liquid was, as he believed, an elixir of life, then no expense was too much, no cost beyond consider-ation, even if it cost him the earth.

He took the cork from the test tube. Slowly, carefully, drop by drop, he poured the liquid evenly into the soil around the orchid.

He stood still before the trellis then, until the darkness was complete, until the crickets and frogs filled his head with a fren-zied singing that seemed near madness. Then he slipped the empty tube into his pocket and went home.

In this way his evenings passed for one month, then another.

By day he was, as usual, consumed by business. He drew up con-tracts in his office or strode along the catwalks over the burning furnaces, while below men worked, shadows shoveling and heft-202

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ing and shaping long bars of steel. The heat from the red-hot metal pleased him, as did the intricate dance between machinery and men, and he looked forward, too, to the end of every week when the accountant brought the production figures to his offi ce high above the plant, sliding them across the mahogany desk in a black leather folder edged with gold leaf. Andrew Byar, born poor in Scotland, was a self-made man, and proud of it. He believed in the power of his own personal will, and he believed in science. Pittsburgh in the 1920s was a pulsing city, powered by great machines and fabulous inventions, and if soot sometimes fell from the air like dark snow, if the rivers grew choked and black, then Andrew Byar believed that science would find solutions. Already electricity had displaced the dangerous hiss of gas, the awkward churning of steam; in decades to come the city would gleam, a bright metropolis, sunlight scattering and refracting from the mirrored surfaces of a million well-oiled moving parts.

All made, of course, from steel.

Byar had profited from his keen understanding of new tech-nologies, as well as from his instincts for risk and innovation. He trusted people less completely, knowing as he did about human frailty and failure—how many men had died in his plant through a single careless action, after all? How many times had a widow appeared in his office, begging for money to feed her fatherless children? He gave it, always, taking care to explain each time how the accident might have been avoided. Thus wise in matters of human failure and culpability, he had given his gardener a camera, with instructions to photograph the orchid in the garden every morning at precisely eight o’clock. Memory, with its unexpected currents, its tendency to favor hope over facts, was not something he would trust. Each day the gardener came into his study and put a manila envelope on his desk, and each day Andrew Byar dated this envelope and filed it in the oak drawer of his desk without opening it up.

At the end of the second month, when his family was in Europe, he locked the door to his study and took the sixty-one sealed envelopes from the drawer. Clear morning light poured through the windows, which ran floor to ceiling along the wall behind
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him. He hung the photos one by one, in chronological order, against the opposite wall, securing each to the plaster with a bit of tape. By the time he reached the last, his hands were trembling.

Still, he was methodical, careful, precise. Not until the fi nal photo was hung did he step back to survey the whole.

What he saw astounded him. He had begun with an orchid whose fl owers were sparse, a plant well past its prime. Yet, nour-ished by this experimental liquid, the plant had flourished so profusely that change was clearly visible from one photo to another.

After only a single week the orchid had burst its pot; twice more in these two months it had done the same, and now it was as large as a bush. Blooms cascaded from stems grown so long that they draped themselves over one another, trailed against the ground.

He went immediately to the garden, where the orchid hung from the center of the trellis, its blossoms living jewels. He touched their waxy white petals, their deep purple hearts, with awe. What had been ordinary had become something from another world, a place more fertile and profuse, a place of unending plenty.

All day he was in a state of euphoric agitation, distracted in his morning meetings, pacing the factory grounds and glancing at his watch, willing the slow hours to pass. At last, evening began to gather, and he went home. He dismissed all the help and sent his car for Beatrice.
Wear white,
he instructed in a note, folding the dense paper once, imagining her at her dressing table, the dark words discarded amid her bottles of perfume. She would be late, he knew.

Spirited and capricious, she would take her time; perhaps she would not come at all. He had seen her first one morning at dawn, an er-rant, early rising guest floating like a petal on the invisible and mysterious currents of the pool, her pale skin almost iridescent.

Dusk was softening the edges of the world. Impatient, unused to idleness, he arranged the setting carefully to pass the time, carrying a white wrought-iron table and chairs to the expanse of soft lawn. It was a night garden, bordered by low clouds of white alyssum. Moonflowers opened as Andrew worked, releasing their faint scents of lemon into the darkness. He hung the spectacular orchid from a low branch of a sycamore tree, each blossom like a candle in a chandelier. In a crystal bowl filled with water he placed
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white lilacs and camellia blossoms, so that the table seemed a part of the garden and yet appeared to float above it, too, to be suspended, hovering as bright and fleeting as a wish.

At last he heard her footsteps, rustling the gravel. And then he glimpsed her on the path, as pale and slender as the stem of a plant. Her white dress had a diaphanous layer, making her both vibrant and undefined, amorphous. She wore a fitted hat, close as a caress against her skull.

“What is it?” she asked, laughing, her lips cool against his own. “I can’t wait to know. What is your surprise?” They sat at the table. Andrew Byar pulled an unlabeled bottle from the canvas bag on the grass, the old glass smooth and undu-lant in his hands.

“This wine,” he said, “is two centuries years old. A case of it was discovered on the bottom of the sea, part of a shipwreck off the coast of France in 1718. For all those decades it lay beneath the waters, and when they brought it up it was still intact. Think of it, Beatrice—the grapes that made this wine grew in the world when the garden where we sit was nothing but wilderness.” Beatrice smiled, intrigued, he could tell, and curious. It was the same look she had given him when she climbed out of the pool at sunrise, her skin so pale against her lavender suit, water streaming from her limbs, and found him standing there, watching her and waiting.

The cork crumbled; he poured the wine and raised his glass to hers.

“To the lost past,” he toasted. “And to our future.” The rare vintage tasted darkly of burnt oak; it was dry, not bitter, with a trace of cherry.
Marvelous,
Beatrice murmured.

When their glasses were empty, Andrew reached into the canvas bag and pulled out another bottle, which he put on the table beside the fi rst.

“This one has a label,” Beatrice observed.