The Book of Kings

by Cynthia Voigt

  Max floated through the corridors as if in a dream, carried along on a cloud of eagerness (he had found his parents!) and anxiety (what should he say?) and excitement (every step brought him closer!) and worry (how would he know what to do?). He could barely remember to put one foot ahead of the other.

  King Teodor’s embassy to Andesia had dressed formally for this meeting, Ari in uniform, a sword at his side, Mr. Bendiff in top hat and tails. Just in case, Max carried the leather folder in which Ari kept his credentials and King Teodor’s letter of introduction. He wore a dark suit that Grammie had ironed that morning, over a shirt so white, its collar so starched, that he felt as if he, too, were in military uniform, and the sword at his side confirmed that feeling. Max walked alone at the rear of the small party and could not catch his breath.

  Max had had stage fright. He knew what that was and how to manage it. But this was a different kind of fear. Everything depended on this meeting and he had no idea how it would go. Also, he was sharing the stage with nonprofessionals, two of them the enemy, and he had no script to follow. He did not allow himself to worry about the odds that this would turn out to be a comedy, with a comedy’s happy ending, and not a tragedy, which ends in death.

  Not death, surely, Max said to himself, floating to a halt behind his companions.

  When they halted, he looked up, looked around him, and saw that they stood at the end of a wide, high-ceilinged room, lit by a row of tall windows, down which raindrops ran freely. Straight-backed chairs lined the walls and their red velvet seats glowed warm against the gray afternoon. The stone floor was covered by a thick red-and-silver carpet that led up to—his eyes followed it past the General’s booted feet and Ari’s legs—a dais on which stood two silver thrones. Empty.

  The silence inside of Max echoed, and rang, and made it impossible to hear, or think.

  From stage right, the King of Andesia entered. He strode up to the larger of the two thrones, a tall man, regal in a white uniform and long red robe, a silver crown gleaming on his dark head, his face—

  Max stared at his father’s face. He could not move, and he knew he should not move, and he did not move, but his eyes drank in William Starling’s square jaw and dark, expressive eyes, his heavy eyebrows and wide forehead, his mouth that did not smile in welcome.

  Why did his mouth not smile? Max wondered, and then—as if only with his father there in front of him could he do it—he woke up. He saw the luxurious splendor of the room, the thrones—could they possibly be solid silver?—each with those three peaks rising from the back, and a dozen soldiers lined up three deep, Malpenso at their front. The General stood beside Ari, ready to introduce the Envoy. Max saw his father’s unsmiling kingliness and the theatrical grace with which he seated himself on the throne with a swirling of red robe, and then rested gloved hands on thighs, waiting for General Balcor to speak.

  He saw the absence of his mother.

  He saw the expression on his father’s face, on the King’s face, as he waited for the General to speak, and give him his cue.

  Where was his mother?

  He saw that the King did not look at the three figures preparing to be formally introduced by the General.

  He saw clearly that he, Max Starling, Solutioneer, could not act, not now, not in any way. He could not say anything or ask anything or do anything. He was Alexander Ireton, Private Secretary to the next Baron Barthold, and invisible.

  Max watched everybody, but especially the King and the General. He watched everything and listened carefully to the exact words spoken by the two principal actors in this scene. That there were only three major roles was obvious—the King, the Envoy, and the General, who was shorter than the foreigner by a full three or four inches but every bit as imposing in full uniform. All the others in the room, the Captain with his troop of soldiers, Mr. Bendiff, a commercial personage, and the Secretary, a nonentity, had only the most minor roles. Max knew that his own group’s appearance was false, and he knew as well that this King was no real king, and wished only to escape his throne. He wondered if Balcor and Malpenso were only what they seemed, and doubted it. And this made him wonder about the soldiers, their appearance of solidarity and strict hierarchy, of obedience to their Captain, who was obedient to their General, who appeared to obey the King’s wishes. Was there anyone in the room who wasn’t acting?

  General Balcor stepped forward, to stand in front of the seated King. “Your Majesty,” he said, bowing over one extended leg, like a practiced courtier.

  “General Balcor,” the King answered. “A good afternoon to you. We are glad to welcome you back in Apapa and are ready to meet this embassy, which has traveled from such a distance to do us honor.”

  The General wasted no words, but set right to his task. “I present first Andrew Robert Von Bauer Cozart, the Baron Barthold, who has come in embassy from Teodor the Third, King of your native land.” Ari stepped up beside the General and bowed over an extended leg, following Balcor’s example. The King remained seated but studied Ari’s face.

  “We did not remember that your family found favor with the royal house,” the King said, and thought. “We have also not heard that the old Baroness is dead.” Having cast doubt on the embassy Max had worked so hard to create, the King looked to the General, as if asking for advice, or maybe to warn him.

  Balcor took only the briefest time for thought before he said, “The Baron asks to be permitted to make a formal presentation of his credentials, to offer you a personal letter from King Teodor, and to explain to you his mission in Andesia.”

  This apparently satisfied the King of Andesia. “Granted,” he told the General. He turned to Ari. “We will receive you the day after tomorrow, at this same hour. If all goes well, your reception will be followed”—he glanced at the General, as if for permission—“by a dinner, during which we will hear from you the particular messages Teodor has sent me.”

  Did his father think Ari carried the blueprint of an escape plan? The promise of an army? What did William Starling, spy, expect from his King?

  “In the name of my King, I thank Your Majesty for this hospitality,” Ari answered, and he bowed again. “I am honored to be so welcomed. May I hope, at that time, to be presented also to Her Majesty, of whom I have heard so much good?”

  At a nod from the General, the King answered with evident pleasure, “We would be pleased if our Queen is able to join us, and it is an hour of the day when she most often feels well enough to leave her chamber. So we can all hope she will be there. She will be eager to hear the news from our former home.”

  “I have heard, and been saddened to hear, that the lady is unwell,” Ari said.

  “She bears it bravely,” the King answered, accepting the younger man’s sympathy without self-pity. “As with all else of this world, it cannot last forever. There is comfort in that.”

  And what did that mean? Max wondered. Was his mother fatally ill? This was so alarming a thought that he almost missed the King’s request.

  “We would ask, General, to be introduced to the other members of this embassy.”

  “Of course, Sire,” the General answered. “I now present Señor Hamish Bendiff, a citizen and subject, with skills in the world of commerce, where he has many times distinguished himself.”

  “Mr. Bendiff.” The King welcomed Pia’s father warmly. “We know of you from our sojourn in Queensbridge. We are glad to welcome you to our poor country, and even more will we welcome any advice and counsel you might give us that might lead to an increase in the well-being of our people.”

  “Your Majesty,” Mr. Bendiff answered with a deep bow. “I will be happy to share what I know, which, while not in itself so significant, might prove useful.”

  “Then look carefully about you, if you would,” the King said. “Any means of allowing our poor to escape the confines of their poverty will be, we assure you, most attentively considered.”

  That, at least, sounded like something William Starling would say,
and Max looked at General Balcor, to see how it was received. He could read nothing on that face.

  “Is the gentleman being given free and full access to whatever he wishes to see?” the King asked General Balcor, in such round and regal tones that Max felt stirrings of alarm. William Starling was enjoying this role, with its red robes and its royal We. He didn’t seem much worried about his Queen, or his son, either.

  “He is, of course,” the General answered. “Of course he is,” he repeated, perhaps with displeasure. “Everyone hopes that good will come to Andesia from this embassy. And there remains to be introduced”—and here he seemed to intensify his watch over the King—“the Secretary…?” There was a pause.

  Ari leaned over to murmur to the General, and the General added, with his attention still fixed on the King’s face, “One Alexander Ireton.”

  Max bowed, low, from the waist, and felt the General’s attention. Not until he was upright did he meet the King’s eyes. His father’s eyes. “Your Majesty,” he said, a young man swollen up with pride at his place on this important occasion.

  At the sight of his son’s face, the King rose. Abruptly. He was seated and then he was on his feet. It was as if the throne beneath him had burst into flames.

  Max did not know what to make of it. Neither, apparently, did General Balcor. “Sire?” the General asked. “What is it?”

  But the King spoke only to the Secretary, as if there was no one else in the room to hear his words. “I did not expect to greet you here for many months,” he said, full of royal anger.

  And Max knew exactly where he was. He was in the second scene of the third act of The Queen’s Man, in which the King’s traitorous younger brother returns from a successful war, with plans to overthrow his brother and take the throne for himself. He knew his line.

  “The winds blew fair for me,” he answered coolly, swollen now not with pride but with arrogant confidence in his cleverness, a young man with every intention of taking the prize.

  General Balcor intervened. “Do you know this…Secretary?” he asked, with just enough hesitation before the word to make Max wonder if he had been discovered—discovered as only a boy, discovered as his father’s son, discovered as a member of an embassy traveling under false pretenses, he didn’t know which. Just discovered: and if so, in danger of his life, of all their lives.

  “I know him too well,” the King answered. He is not welcome here, his voice conveyed clearly, to all of them. “I know him to be a coward, and a fool, and a conniving opportunist, for all that I also know him to be my mother’s son.”

  The room vibrated with silence. Ari and Mr. Bendiff both turned to Max, but Max looked only at the King.

  The General said, “I did not know there was a brother, Sire.”

  Captain Malpenso stepped forward to ask, “Do we take him to the cells?”

  “The man is not dangerous,” the King said scornfully, at the same time that Ari pointed out calmly, “He stands under my protection.”

  “No need of prison,” General Balcor decided, “not when the Baron claims him. As long as his presence does not disturb you, Sire?” he asked.

  The King of Andesia had returned to his throne and assumed a carelessness that was obviously false. “We are in no danger from such a creature. We are only surprised to see him in respectable company—no offense intended to you, Baron.”

  How did he expect Ari to answer that? Max wondered, but he recognized the dramatic skills of William Starling, building the tension of a scene.

  Ari only repeated what he had said before. “He is my Private Secretary. I am the Envoy of my King.”

  “That will be enough,” the General assured the Envoy. “Have no doubt of it.” To his King he said, “Let us make our farewells,” and he bowed.

  Ari, Mr. Bendiff, and Max also bowed, although Max carefully did not bow so deeply as to take his eyes off the King’s face, an insolence for all present to see. They followed the General out of the throne room and back into the long corridor. Some of the soldiers came behind while others remained with the King.

  Max did not take in the details of this corridor on the return journey, either, but for entirely different reasons. He was thinking furiously about what his father had told him, and acting furiously like a traitorous younger brother ambitious to seize the throne, and at the same time planning furiously for the next scene.

  The Rescue

  • ACT I •

  SCENE 2 MAX’S PLAN

  In that small city, word spread quickly—but who spread it?—that the Secretary was no less than the King’s brother. Despised and unwelcome, perhaps, but still, the brother of the King. Moreover, everyone knows how the wrongs done between brothers give rise to long-lasting hatred, even vengefulness. The Carrera y Carrera cousins understood this; they understood also that in such quarrels, no outsider can know who is in the right. On the whole, Juan Carlos advised his family to welcome the news. If nothing else, it made this Alexander Ireton a more significant guest at their table. As the King’s brother he was, among other things, next in line for the throne. That evening, they welcomed him into their hacienda with warm attentions.

  Max was no longer free to stand at the back of the drawing room or sit silently at the bottom of the long table. Just at the time when he needed to think with as much concentration and speed as he ever had before, in his whole life, Max had to be flirted with from behind a fan. He had to be flattered by all three of his hosts. He had to be included in the conversation at the head of the table, during the usual meal of the usual roast alpaca and yams with a chili-jicama relish Mr. Bendiff couldn’t get enough of, the usual French wines, and the usual condensed milk pudding for sweet.

  Like all other men who grew up together, like brothers, in fact, the cousins seemed to be able to act in unison at the same time that each tried to outshine the others. So that, during the long evening, Juan Luc and Juan Antonio made it clear that Juan Carlos was not the practical businessman they were, that his silver mine had yielded less and less income for years and he’d made no plans for the future, although they granted him a daughter who would marry well, and also granted him a superiority in sophistication. At other times, Juan Carlos and Juan Antonio were not at all interested in Mr. Bendiff’s questions about the alpaca wool the natives wore. Only Juan Luc was willing to discuss the number of beasts an acre could feed, and the recipe for the spicy sauce, too, revealing himself to be little more than a merchant at heart, as his cousins pointed out. Max noticed that Juan Luc and Juan Carlos did not bother to disguise their pity for Juan Antonio, who had no sons to inherit his name and no suitors for his two daughters, and had let himself grow fat from his disappointment.

  Max had to be included in all these conversations. Even Elizaveta occasionally smiled in his direction, and once leaned across Captain Malpenso to ask Max if he found the girls of Andesia as charming as those of his homeland. “Certainly you are,” declared the Captain, as if Elizaveta had spoken to him, not the Secretary, and she drew back into her seat, away from the soldier, and insisted, “Señor Ireton, do you?” although it seemed to Max that she was more interested in not talking to Malpenso than in hearing his opinion.

  However, “Charming?” Max echoed politely, and, thinking of Pia, wanted to laugh out loud. It was the grin of a thirteen-year-old boy that spread over his face, he knew, and he erased it immediately. But in fact, Elizaveta’s restless glance had returned to Ari, whom she asked, “Did you know who he was?” and Max could see that Ari did not know how to answer that question, so he knocked over his glass of wine.

  In the ensuing confusion of apology and gracious acceptance, Max tried to signal to Ari that they should leave as soon as possible.

  —

  Once back in the guesthouse, Max gathered everyone together in the sitting room. The others each took a chair, but Max was too agitated to stay still. “It’s The Queen’s Man,” he told them, looking down at the six faces that watched him. “Gra—I mean, Mrs. Sevin knows it, b
ut I’ll summarize it for the rest of you.” He paced, and told the story.

  “It starts in a garden. A young noblewoman is asking her old Nurse for advice about which of three suitors she should accept. Two are of royal blood, one the eldest son and heir to the throne, the other his younger brother. The third is a fine young man of noble birth. All three are possible matches for her. The Nurse asks if she loves any of them, and she does, she loves the eldest son. Except—which is the point of the scene, the except.” He remembered, “My father calls scenes like this the ‘excepting scenes,’ because without them the action of a play won’t start…”

  Max was momentarily distracted from his tale-telling by the unwelcome memory of the way the King had watched the General—his jailer? adviser? prime minister?—during the interview. It felt suddenly as if the mountains had moved closer, closing in on the embassy, to trap them. He felt sharply, as sharply as he might feel his fingers burning on a pot handle, his own ignorance. There was too much he didn’t know. He turned his back to the listening people and looked at the shuttered and barred windows of the room, beyond which stood soldiers to keep them safe (but from whom?) or to block their escape (again, from whom?), and beyond the soldiers rose those mountains.

  But if this was a trap, wouldn’t his father have warned him? Hadn’t his father called for help? Could Max have misunderstood everything?

  “Wake up, Eyes!” Tomi urged, more loudly than was necessary.

  “I know the story, I can tell it,” Grammie offered.

  “No,” Tomi advised. “Let him tell it. He’ll have a plan.”

  Tomi was right, and he’d been right to shake Max out of his nightmare. How did Tomi know so much about him? Max wondered, with a curious glance at the stocky boy, who never seemed out of sorts or out of hope. Was he going to end this rescue mission with a friend as well as parents? At that question, Max felt his spirits rise.