The Kings and Queens of Roam: A Novel

by Daniel Wallace

  “I wish you would let me meet him,” Rachel said.

  “He’s sick,” he said.

  “You always say that.”

  “Because he’s always sick. He’s very old. Isn’t that right, Mother?”

  “Oh, yes,” she said. “Older than old. When he’s better, he tell you so much about Roam. He was there, you know, at very beginning.”

  “I know,” Rachel said. “Markus told me. I hope Ming Kai gets better.”

  “He will,” Liling said. She glared at his great-grandson. “Why you wait? Go!”

  Markus went, turning back every few steps to see if Liling had left Rachel alone. She hadn’t. When he came to the entrance of the cave she was still there, next to Rachel, watching him, waiting.

  Later when he came out of the cave they were gone.

  He found her on the boat an hour or so later. She was standing with her back to the door, her thick red hair falling halfway down her back.

  “I was looking for you,” he said.

  She didn’t turn. “Your mother and I had a talk today.”

  “When I went to see Ming Kai,” he said.

  “That’s right. I realized it was one of the only times I’ve been alone, without you somewhere around, since I’ve been here.”

  “I don’t think—”

  “It’s true,” she said. “Maybe the first time.”

  “I just want to help you, Rachel, take care of you. That’s all. You know how important you are to me.”

  She turned to him. “My sister was like that,” she said. “She always wanted to take care of me. She never left me alone. That’s one of the reasons I left. To show her I could be on my own and that she—” For the first time since he’d known her, Rachel began to cry, just one tear, glistening on her perfect cheek. “And that she could be on hers.”

  Markus held the mirror he’d found in his right hand, hidden, as if she could see it. He’d been looking at himself a lot since he’d found it.

  “So what did you and my mother talk about?”

  “What do you think we talked about?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Rachel shook her head. “We talked about the water, Markus. The river water. The water you took to Ming Kai.”

  “Oh.”

  “She said it was a kind of medicine. A kind of magic.”

  “It can be.”

  “She said that I might be able to see again. That the water could make it happen. Why didn’t you tell me, Markus?”

  He hesitated a moment. He wasn’t sure whether to tell some of the truth, or all of it.

  “I was going to,” he said.

  “When?”

  “When I thought it was time.”

  “When you thought it was time?”

  Markus tried to find a way to say what he meant. He looked into the mirror. “The world,” he said, “your world, is different than you think it is, Rachel. In so many ways. I didn’t want to upset you.”

  “Different how? What does that even mean?”

  “You don’t want to know what it means.”

  “You’re wrong,” she said. No tears anymore, just anger.

  “You’re not ready.”

  “No,” she said, her voice rising to a harsh crescendo. “You’re not ready!”

  He couldn’t look at her anymore, and so he looked at himself, at the face of a man he never imagined becoming. So ashamed. He had always admired the old men who told stories around the fire, and one day he thought he would become one of them. Instead, he’d become a liar. A storyteller makes up things to help other people; a liar makes up things to help himself.

  He looked up from the mirror, but he was too late: she was out the cabin door and off the boat before he could even move.

  “Rachel! Rachel, wait!”

  By the time he made it out the door she was already halfway down the hill, running wildly, but running directly toward the cave: clearly, Liling had even told her where it was. She was fast, unbelievably so; she had memorized every rock, every root and branch, and navigated her way down the hill. He wasn’t going to get to her in time. How could she be so eager to get away from him, after everything he’d done for her?

  But then she tripped, and fell hard, cutting her hands as she tried to break her fall, one side of her face scraping across the rocky embankment, rolling twice before she stopped, her chest heaving, her face contorted, wincing in pain.

  Markus pulled her to her feet, and not gently.

  “I’m sorry, Markus,” she said. “I’m sorry. Take me back to the boat. I don’t want to go to the cave. You’re right: I’m not ready. Later . . .”

  “No,” he said, gripping her by the arm: he would leave a bruise. “I’ll show you. I’ll show you what I was protecting you from.”

  She struggled against his grip, but he wasn’t going to let her free of it, no matter what. The Valley people watched them, watched them as though they were witnessing a play that they had no reason or desire to interrupt. When Markus came to the thick sheet of vines hanging over the cave entrance, he stopped, knowing that nothing would be the same after this.

  “Markus!” she wailed. “Take me back to the boat!”

  He pulled her through the opening and down the path he’d taken so many times. Rachel cried and kicked, but Markus had the strength of his anger, and there was nothing she could do now, nothing, that would free her from his grip.

  He walked her waist deep into the cold pool, the river rushing by just below them. One last time she struggled. But she was spent. She was shivering, no fight left in her.

  “Markus,” she pleaded. “Please. I’m afraid.”

  “You want to know, Rachel? You want to know? So know.”

  And with that he pushed her under, all of her, holding her by the back of the neck for far, far too long. Her arms and legs tore at the water violently—no doubt she thought he was trying to drown her. And he almost did. But at the last possible moment he pulled her out, and she gasped for her life. The rainbow dust fell like rain from the cave walls, fell on her wet hair and her face, until she herself glowed. She didn’t struggle; her chest rose and fell, slower and slower. She stood like that for a minute or more.

  Then she turned to him. He had loved her from the moment he saw her, and now he loved her even more—now that he knew he would lose her.

  “Oh, Markus,” she said, gazing at the glittering world around her, wide-eyed in wonder, “why would you ever want to keep this from me?” She threw her arms around his neck and hugged him.

  She let go of him too soon, and took his hand and started to pull him up the embankment. He didn’t move.

  “Wait,” he said. He knew that as much had changed for her, more change was coming, and he wanted to hold this moment for a moment longer. “I did this for you,” he said.

  “I know,” she said. “Thank you.”

  And since he still wouldn’t move, she let go of his hand and walked to the cave’s entrance, pausing before the vines, where the sun slipped through in raw, thin beams, and then pushed her way past. He waited for a moment, imagining what she was seeing now: the gray trees and rocky soil, the leafless branches veining hopelessly into the sky, the primitive huts and painfully lethargic people, all of them turning now to stare at her. Even the dogs stood and stared. He wasn’t brave enough to be with her as she took it in. But he was close enough, just on the other side of the vines, to hear her horrified whisper: “Oh,” she said, “oh, my God.”

  He would have stayed in the cave forever if he could. He wasn’t angry at her anymore and wished he’d never been. He wanted to take it all back now, because he knew that nothing was going to be the same. And no, it hadn’t been perfect before, but it was good enough, and now all of that was gone. He stepped through the vines and she was there, an arm’s length away from him, but he didn’t reach out to her: she was rigid, so transfixed on what was before her he thought that if he touched her she would crack and shatter like a sheathing of river ice. She looked so smal
l now, her thick red hair matted wet against her blouse, water still dripping from her fingers. “You wanted to know, Rachel,” he said. “You told me—”

  And Rachel, softly but clearly: “I know what I said.”

  He took half a step closer and saw her stiffen. He walked around until he faced her, until there was nothing she could see but him, and still she wouldn’t look at him; something kept her from it. Finally, though, she did, and she almost smiled.

  “So you’re Markus,” she said. She lifted her right hand—out of habit—to touch his face, then dropped her arm to her side and studied him instead, gathering him into her eyes. “You’re . . . pretty. Or handsome. Girls are pretty; men are handsome.” She saw his confusion and said, “I don’t think it matters: even if you’ve never seen it before, you know what beauty is, and what it’s not. It’s amazing how quickly—how quickly I see it, and know the difference.”

  She blinked her eyes. She looked like she’d been asleep for a very long time.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “If I hurt you.”

  “You almost drowned me.”

  “I’m . . . sorry.”

  He could tell she didn’t care whether he apologized or not. Her eyes—beautiful even when she was blind—burst with light, like a pair of suns. “It’s not what I imagined it would be,” she said. “But you knew that. You knew I had a different picture of the world. Because you helped make it for me. It’s awful, isn’t it, even for you?” She waited for him to answer; he only nodded. Seeing her so disappointed made him almost unbearably sad. But how could she be otherwise? “I wish I were back in the cave,” she said. “No—I wish I were still blind. Just like Helen said: it’s better not to see at all.”

  “Don’t say that.”

  “Don’t tell me what to say,” she said. “Don’t tell me what to think. You’ve done that enough already.” She turned away. The damp earth, the gray sky: she took all of it in. “This is where you brought me?”

  He didn’t answer. She knew everything she needed to know about the Valley, all from a single glance. “I don’t know what to do now,” he said, though he did know. He knew what he had to do as he gripped the mirror in his hand. He would finish what he started. He had hoped—and it was a ridiculous hope, he knew that now—that this moment would have marked the real beginning of their life together. That he would be able to name the world with her, for her. Tree, he’d say, this is a tree. And she’d look at it from every angle, piecing its parts together, first the sprawling grandness of it and then closer, examining a branch, bark, the mystery of a leaf. They could spend a day on a tree—two on a shoe. He looked at her shoes now, thinking of them. They still didn’t match. She still wore the one she had when he found her, the other from the man at the motel the dogs had killed. She raised her arm again, and he wanted her to take his hand, to forgive him, to say everything was going to be all right. Instead she pushed him aside, and took a step toward the people, who still hadn’t moved. They were stunned. Even though all of them knew what the water was capable of, they had never seen such a thing as this; they had never seen such a thing as Rachel.

  “Rachel, wait,” he said, and when she didn’t stop he said, “Please.”

  “What is it, Markus?”

  “There’s . . . more.”

  “More what?”

  “More for you to see. More I have to show you.”

  He pressed the mirror into her hand. He pressed it there so hard it cut them both. She winced, and opened her hand. The mirror angled away from her, toward the gray and misty sky, and, as if being directed to, she looked up toward the sky as well. So she knew what it was. She had to. Mirror. He watched her lips move around the word, but she made no sound. Mirror. Then, slowly, she turned it on herself, and for the first time saw who she was. Her cheek, chin, her lips. Her eyes. Then all of her, her entire face, a face that had no equal in the world as far as Markus knew, as far as Markus could even imagine. With her fingertips she traced the curve of her cheekbones, and then the shallow hollows beneath her eyes. She touched her lips, and watched herself touching them, and then her nose, and her chin. She blinked: for some reason, this almost made her smile.

  “So,” he said. “Now you know what real beauty is.”

  She nodded. Rachel knew. She couldn’t stop looking at herself and the face she had lived behind without even knowing what it was. The curse her sister had laid on her was lifted in that instant, but the curse was replaced by a mystery. By more than one mystery—by many, too many to count. And as the mysteries filled her up the blood drained from her face, and her face turned the pallor of death. Her perfect beauty was still there, but all that was lovely about it, and sweet, and hopeful—and whatever scrap of love she had for Markus, or for the world—melted away.

  She couldn’t stop looking in the mirror. When she spoke it was as if she were talking to herself.

  “Not having to see myself—my face—was my only blessing in this life. Helen told me that. She said, As hard as it is to be blind, if you had to see yourself every day, to know the face you really wore: that would be worse. But it’s not—I’m not—like that.” She looked at Markus, bewildered as a child. “She said I was so ugly my face frightened people. Why would Helen say that if it wasn’t true?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, knowing full well why. “I don’t know.”

  She nodded. Then she dropped the mirror to the ground and crushed it beneath her shoe. Rachel remembered what Mrs. Samuels said, the day she was leaving Roam: She tells you lies and you believe her because you don’t know any better, because she’s never let you know any better. She’s never let another soul near you. You couldn’t know. But now you can, now you can.

  Now I can.

  “And you,” she said coolly. “Why didn’t you tell me? When you knew who I thought I was, all this time. You waited an entire year.”

  “I told you,” he said. “I told you the day we met, but you didn’t believe me. I tried, Rachel.”

  “You should have tried harder.”

  “Yes, yes . . . But, Rachel,” he said, desperately. “It doesn’t matter now. I love you. I’ve always loved you. And I think you love me. I saved your life.”

  And now she touched him, touched him the way he always dreamed she would. The tips of her fingers traced his cheeks, his nose, his chin. He closed his eyes so she could touch them as well and felt her fingers touch the deepest part of him. She pulled him closer, his mouth so close to hers he breathed her breath, and closer still, until the dream he had nurtured every day since he met her became too real to believe: she kissed him, a kiss so light and brief it almost may not have happened at all. But it did happen. His whole body felt it.

  “Thank you for saving my life,” she whispered in his ear.

  Then she slapped him with all the strength she had, and he fell back, stunned, holding his face in his hands. It was as hard as he had ever been hit in his entire life, as hard as he ever would be.

  “What else haven’t you told me?” she said. She took a hard step toward him, and he flinched. “What else?”

  He shook his head from side to side without conviction. He was a liar. He had become the man he never thought he could be. His desperate need to love her had made him so. A secret doesn’t feel wrong until it’s discovered, and he felt it, every dark scrap of shame. One last glance from her, knife-sharp, and she pushed past him, knocking his shoulder to one side with the power of a man. He stumbled, but it was his grief that made him fall to his knees.

  “Rachel,” he called after her. “Stop, please!” But it was pointless: she wasn’t listening to him anymore. “Where are you going?”

  “Where do you think?” she answered. “To see Ming Kai.”

  Ming Kai’s hut was at the top of a rocky incline, just before the Valley ended and the next world, whatever it was, began. Beyond that lip of land was the mystery so many of the Valley people had journeyed into. Ming Kai’s hut was propitiously situated to encounter the least amount of runoff
during the heavy rains (the hut at the bottom suffered most; its inhabitant, Jerrod, the slow boy, lived ankle deep in mud, not that he seemed to mind much), but its distance from the rest of his dwindling tribe also insured a privacy no one else could claim.

  Rachel hadn’t known where Ming Kai was until she got her sight back. She knew where everything else was in the Valley because she’d been taken everywhere else, and she’d taken it all in. She’d mapped out the Valley the same way she’d mapped out Roam, step by step. Ming Kai’s hut was in a blank spot in the topography of her mind. She knew now, though. No one stopped her, and no one followed her but the dogs; even Markus hung back. He had known how this was going to play out. Maybe it was for the best; maybe she would understand why he had done what he’d done . . . though he doubted it. Because Ming Kai wouldn’t lie to her; he didn’t know how.

  MING KAI

  No one had ever known a man so old, or even believed that any man could live to be so old, as Ming Kai. They had stopped counting the years years ago. His body was shriveled, shrunken by age, the skin so tight around his bones she could see every one of them, a skeleton covered by a thin leathery sheaf. She could see his heart beat; she could see his heart. There were two old women on their knees on either side of his bamboo cot spooning water on him—his head, his chest, his arms, his stomach, his thighs, the thin and fragile remnants of what used to be a man. They were humming to themselves. He breathed four or five times a minute; all he had to do was skip one breath and his eyes would close forever.

  He was sleeping when Rachel pushed through the skein of weathered silk that served as his makeshift door.

  “Ming Kai,” she said.

  The old women glared at her and shooed her away. “Sleeping,” one said. But Rachel paid no attention and pushed past them until she stood over him. “Ming Kai!” When he didn’t stir she shook him by the shoulder until his eyelids creaked open.

  “Ah,” he said as his eyes fluttered open to see her. He even smiled. “Rachel McCallister. Pretty Rachel McCallister.”

  “You know me?” she asked.