The Book of Kings

by Cynthia Voigt

  He picked up the thread of the story. “The first except is: The young woman knows that the younger brother is eaten up with jealousy, about everything having to do with his older brother, and also that he is capable of doing anything, however wrong, to get what he wants. So if she agrees to marry the one she loves, that may be what causes his brother to attack him, destroy him somehow, maybe even murder him. The nobleman, on the other hand, is noble in nature as well as birth, and he is truly devoted to her. He would make her a good husband, and marrying him would keep her true love safe. Except, she doesn’t love him. Although she feels real friendship for him, and pity because she can’t answer his feelings. Except, the surest way to know what might threaten her beloved would be for her to marry his younger brother—who makes her skin crawl. In the opening scene, she is asking the Nurse what the right thing to do is.”

  He had everybody’s attention now, although Mr. Bendiff looked a little impatient, as if he wanted to ask, What’s the point of all this?

  “What the Nurse says to her is, ‘To marry for fear or for pity, that’s a great wrong; ’tis best to marry only for love, since a wrong can give birth only to greater wrongs.’ So the Nurse advises her to marry the older brother, the one she loves, the King-to-be.”

  Colly wondered, “Couldn’t she just not marry any of them?”

  Max laughed. “Of course she could, but then there would be no play. At the end of act one, she marries the older brother. At the start of act two, which takes place not long after, the old King dies, her husband assumes the throne, and she becomes Queen. The third suitor, the nobleman, becomes the Queen’s Man, and protects her from the younger brother, who spreads rumors that she’s unfaithful to her husband, and claims that she is scheming with him to make him King, with her as his Queen. He’s the King’s only brother, and the King will not see how dangerous he is until, in a blind fury at a banquet, the brother draws a knife on the Queen, who by then is very pregnant with their first child. The Queen’s Man swats the knife out of his hand, and at that point even the King acknowledges the danger.”

  “But of course it’s his brother,” said Colly, so swallowed up by the story that he leaned forward in his seat, to hear as soon as possible what would happen next.

  Max told it more quickly. “At the end of act two, to keep his wife safe, the King makes his brother a general and sends him off to a distant war, with the idea that he will be gone for years. In act three, the brother returns unexpectedly. He finds out that the Queen has had a son, which means that now one more person stands between him and the throne. He tries to kill the child, but the King catches him at it, stops him, and accuses him of treason. The brother, because he is of royal blood, has the right to a trial by duel, against someone of noble birth. The King has to accept the challenge. He doesn’t want to, but the younger brother has forced his hand. So the Queen’s Man steps in, to fight the duel with the brother, because if he loses and the brother goes free, he’ll still have been unmasked before everyone. And if he wins, the Queen and her son will be safe. But if the King fights and loses, the brother will rule as regent, so the child will be at risk, and the Queen, too. Even if the King fights and wins, he’ll have killed his own brother. So. At the climax, there’s a duel in which the Queen’s Man kills the younger brother.”

  “That’s the end?” Colly asked.

  For Max’s purposes it was, but he understood Colly’s curiosity. “There’s a final scene,” he told the boy. “The denouement. The Queen’s Man goes to see the old Nurse to tell her he’s emigrating to Brazil, because now the Queen is safe, and her son, too. Moreover, the King wishes to be the one who protects her, as he should be. ‘I’ve done all I can,’ the Queen’s Man tells the Nurse as he’s exiting the stage, ‘I’ve done my best.’ And she answers—it’s the last line of the play—‘What more than his best should a man ask of himself?’ ”

  Colly nodded, satisfied.

  Mr. Bendiff, however, was not. “What does this story have to do with getting your parents out of Andesia?”

  Of course Mr. Bendiff hadn’t understood the cue. Max shouldn’t have expected him to recognize the King’s line, and what it meant. “In the play,” he told Pia’s father, “when the younger brother shows up in court when he’s supposed to be hundreds of miles away with his army? The King uses the same words my father said to me today, ‘I did not expect to greet you here for many months.’ ”

  “And?” Mr. Bendiff asked.

  “And I answered him with the younger brother’s line, ‘The winds blew fair for me.’ ”

  “I get that,” Mr. Bendiff said. “I remember you said that, because you know perfectly well that the Estrella was a steamship, not a sailing ship. But what does it have to do with us forming a plan?”

  “It is the plan,” Max told him. “Because of the duel. My father was showing the General that there is bad blood between the two of us.”

  “He’s going to fight a duel with Ari?” Mr. Bendiff asked.

  It was becoming clear to Max that the kind of imagination necessary to be a talented businessman was not the same required for a playwright. He hoped Mr. Bendiff would be a good enough actor not to give everything away.

  “A duel with me,” Max said. “We’ve done it before, onstage, so he knows I know how. Only this time, I’ll kill him. Or it’ll look like I’ve killed him,” he corrected himself, “and then you and Ari will insist on taking me back to Queensbridge to be tried under our laws. But really we’ll be making our escape.”

  “What about your mother?” Grammie asked. “If you think I’m leaving without her…”

  “Nobody would think that,” Joachim said. “I could slip out and find her while all this is going on, couldn’t I, Max?”

  Max had thought it out. “She isn’t of royal blood herself. She just married it, and she’ll want to return to her own people. They’ll be glad to have her go, that’s my guess.”

  Ari had been thinking. “What about your father? How do we get him away? If he’s supposed to be dead.”

  “We could fill a coffin with stones, pretend he’s in it, and then sneak him out into the countryside under cover of darkness,” Tomi suggested.

  “Or we could put him in the coffin,” Colly offered. “With airholes, of course, and leave Andesia openly, carrying the coffin on a wagon draped with a silver cloth or something else royal, and the Queen would ride with us, on her own mule, with a silver saddlecloth.”

  Unlike Mr. Bendiff, Colly did have a dramatic imagination.

  Max knew the body would present a problem, but he was hoping that the solution to that problem would become apparent, once there was a body. “A false coffin isn’t a bad idea,” he said.

  “We’ll have to do this during the reception,” Ari said. “With everybody watching.”

  “That’s the point of it,” Max said. “That’s why my father cued me with that line.”

  “It seems risky,” Joachim observed.

  “Yes,” Max agreed.

  “What if you’re caught?” Joachim asked.

  This, Max had thought hard about. “Ari has King Teodor’s letters to protect him, and you, too, Mr. Bendiff, because Teodor sent you as well. Grammie, Tomi, Colly, and Joachim are all servants. They can’t be blamed.”

  “I’m the party’s artist,” Joachim pointed out.

  “That wasn’t an official appointment, and besides, artists are a little loony, you told me everybody thinks so, in every society. People don’t think artists are dangerous. I’d be the only one in trouble,” Max told them. “I think the rest of you would be safe, although you’d probably be thrown out of the country.”

  “But there’s a little butter-yellow mountain flower…,” Joachim protested, which as far as Max was concerned just proved the point about artists.

  Then Joachim fell silent, as silent as everyone else, thinking, until Mr. Bendiff, who had been huffing a little, shifting himself in his chair the way people do when they’re waiting to see if anyone else is
going to speak up, finally objected. “I don’t see it, and I haven’t heard anybody else’s ideas…Not that I have one myself, yet, but I could, I’m sure. Are we supposed to just let this…this estimable young man, I grant you that, but are we going to let him move us around like chess pieces? Is that wise? When there are three grown men in the room, and a woman with a lifetime of experience, too?” He looked around at all the faces in that shadowy room and, being a person of some experience himself, saw immediately that nobody else had the same doubts. “I guess I have to trust you to know what to do,” he said. “I hope you’re right.”

  “I hope so, too.” Max’s voice rang with sincerity, because it was so very true. He could only hope to have it right, but because that was all he could do, he hoped all the more fervently. Then he did sit down, to set out the details of his plan.

  “We have a day and a half. Everything will have to be ready at the time of the reception the day after tomorrow.” He gave the orders: Grammie was to have chickens to slaughter so that on the morning she could fill a small, flimsy sack with fresh blood. Max would take one of the gold coins he’d hidden in the waist of his trousers so that Joachim could hire a wagon from a farm outside the city. “We don’t want word of a family’s sudden riches to reach Apapa before we’re safely away.” Tomi and Colly had the job of gradually gathering stones to equal the weight of a man.

  Ari’s part was to continue acting the proud Ambassador, and when the time came, to do anything he could to heighten the tension that would lead to the duel. “Then, when my father is lying there dead,” Max told Ari, “you need to hover over the body and make sure no one gets close enough to see that it’s an act. He’s a very good actor, and people have always believed it when the Queen’s Man kills the brother—there’s that gasping sound from the audience, that’s how I can be so sure,” he told Mr. Bendiff. “But this isn’t a play, people don’t know they’re the audience, and also they’ll be closer to the body than they would be if it was on the stage. Afterward, it’s going to be up to you to do your full Baron Barthold act.”

  Ari nodded. “What if the General doesn’t listen to me?”

  “If he thinks it’ll work in his favor, he’ll listen,” Mr. Bendiff said. “That’s human nature. But what about me?”

  “Your job is to involve the Carrera y Carrera cousins in business proposals,” Max said. “Believable ideas, I mean, and profitable, especially for Juan Carlos, if what we hear about the silver mine producing less is correct. We need the Carrera y Carreras to not want to upset the embassy and risk losing possible profits. If they’re a little confused about which side they want to be on, about who to back, that will work to our advantage. Anyway, that’s what I think,” he added, because Mr. Bendiff would know more about anything to do with business.

  “Well,” said Mr. Bendiff, “I guess I might be wrong to doubt you, young man.”

  “Thank you, sir,” he said. Maybe later, once they were safely beyond the boundaries of Andesia, if they did get that far, he would take a minute to enjoy the memory of Hamish Bendiff’s benediction. Now, however, he had other things on his mind, not the least of which was his loss of invisibility.

  The Rescue

  • ACT I •

  SCENE 3 DANGER! DANGER!

  Alone, Max sat on the edge of his bed. He couldn’t do anything to make things happen more quickly, he knew. He had to wait—wait again! wait more!—through the entire next day and most of the day after. He sighed, stretched, and stood up to fetch a freshly laundered nightshirt from the basket of clean linens the servants had left beside Ari’s bedroom door. It was not until he had the nightshirt in his hand that he saw the snake.

  The creature was curled on top of a pile of handkerchiefs that had been under the nightshirt. It was an elegant thing, bands of bright yellow and sharp black and a deep, bloody red. Disturbed by the removal of its cover, the creature unwound—

  Max leaped backward, up onto the low bed.

  —and its head swung toward him in what could have been irritation. Or attack.

  “Ari?” he called, but not loudly. He heard the movement beyond the door cease and knew that Ari had caught the urgency in his voice.

  The words rushed out of Max. “Don’t move fast bring your sword there’s a snake.”

  “Where?” Ari’s voice was surprisingly calm.

  “In the basket of linens just by your door.”

  Max was transfixed. The snake had raised its head now, to watch him, and he was almost enchanted by its sleek beauty and its attentive stillness. He could understand how any small creature, any field mouse, could be hypnotized by this snake. He had his attention so riveted on the sleek, swaying creature, the darting fangs, the slitted eyes, that the first he was aware of Ari’s presence was the flash of the blade, falling, to cut off its head.

  Max’s knees gave way. “What—?”

  Ari stepped over the basket to sit down beside Max on the bed. Eventually, “That’s a coral snake,” he said, and his voice shook. “They call it the twenty-minute death.”

  “I don’t know anything about snakes,” Max whispered.

  “I looked them up,” Ari said, taking a deep breath, and then another. “I looked up poisonous snakes, and poisonous insects, too. I wanted to know the dangers,” he explained.

  “You saved my life,” Max said, shocked, since it just then came home to him that he might have lost that same life, not two minutes earlier.

  At that, Ari smiled quietly. “Then we’re even,” he said.

  For a while, neither of them spoke, until Ari asked the very same thing that Max was unwilling to say out loud. “How did it get there?”

  “And why now?” Max asked, since they seemed to agree that the snake had not slithered up the stairs on its own and then, tired by the effort, decided to take a nap in the convenient basket.

  “Was it for me?” Ari wondered.

  “Who would care enough about me?” Max asked, and he hoped he was right.

  “You are the King’s brother,” Ari offered.

  “But I’m not a threat to anyone. Though—why would anyone want you dead, either? You’re a useful connection for them. Unless it’s not the Carrera y Carreras, unless it’s the General. In which case…” But Max wasn’t sure what that case was.

  After a while, “It could be a coincidence,” Ari suggested.

  “It could have crawled into the basket when Suela or Devera was taking the laundry off the line,” Max tried.

  They both doubted that. Neither one spoke his doubts aloud.

  “We’d better be vigilant,” Ari decided. “There was that cake bomb and— Have you wondered, Max—because I have—about the Queen’s poor health? The kind of day-after-day poor health that slowly gets worse and never better?”

  Yes. He had been thinking that. “Is there arsenic in Andesia?” Max asked unhappily.

  How could he wait another day and a half if someone was trying to poison his mother?

  “The world is full of poisons,” Ari announced, equally unhappily.

  And why wasn’t the King protecting his wife?

  “For that matter, we could have been poisoned at any one of these dinners. We could have been poisoned tonight,” Ari concluded.

  “Do you think we were?” Max asked.

  Was it fear or poison contracting his stomach?

  “Actually, no. I don’t. If they wanted us dead, they’d have slaughtered us on the journey into Andesia. The soldiers, or Stefano and his men, and they’d have blamed it on robbers. But now they’ve taken our measure…and with this snake…and there’s another dinner tomorrow…I’d better tell Hamish—just in case.”

  “Just in case,” Max agreed.

  Left alone with the limp body of the snake, he didn’t move from the bed, but stared at the one small, shuttered window and felt, although he couldn’t see them, the presence of the three peaks that hovered over the small city like great-winged, carrion-eating condors. The twenty-minute death. Twenty minutes, he though
t. Twenty minutes and then—

  Now he really was afraid. There was no eager excitement to it, not any longer. His legs wanted to run, run fast and away, and he didn’t care who he left behind.

  Except, of course, he did care, and he couldn’t run. All he could do was be as careful and smart as he had it in him to be, and to make use of all the wariness and intelligence of the people he was traveling with. If they couldn’t pull the rescue off together, it couldn’t be done. This was not something that was up to just the Solutioneer. Mister Max, on his own, could never do it.

  Reluctantly, they woke the rest of the party to warn them, although they all agreed Grammie and Joachim and Tomi and Colly were unlikely to be the objects of an attack. Probably, they decided, Ari was the target. He was, after all, the official leader of their party, its most important member. If Ari were to come to grief here, no other nation would send an embassy for a long time and Andesia would remain as isolated as somebody wished.

  But who longed so desperately for the present isolation to continue? Balcor? Juan Carlos? All three Carrera y Carrera cousins? It might even be the people themselves, although, “Probably not,” Max decided. No one would want to continue living like that, slaves in the mines, servants in the homes of the wealthy, subsistence farmers, or outlaws hiding out in the mountains, and always under the rule of a foreign army.

  “It is, however, Balcor’s army,” Ari pointed out, “and his mother was Andesian.”

  “Could Balcor have family left in Andesia?” Tomi asked. “Who was his mother? One of the people or a Carrera y Carrera?”

  Colly wondered, “How did she come to marry a Peruvian? Did she want to marry or could she have been forced into it? By the royal family, maybe, or one of the Carrera y Carreras. What if someone wanted to get rid of her?”