The Book of Kings

by Cynthia Voigt

  By now the Queen, too, had risen from her throne, her hand placed protectively over her belly. Or her pillow, Max thought, as a nervous excitement bubbled up in him. He took a deep breath, to steady himself. He turned to reassure the Envoy.

  “His insults are for me alone, Baron,” Max said, speaking from deep in his diaphragm, as if he were projecting his voice from a stage.

  General Balcor came up close beside Ari, and spoke into his ear, and placed a restraining hand on his sword arm.

  Max turned back to the King, his father. “I would be the better man for the throne that has been given you. We both know that. My head is more worthy of a crown. The Queen,” he sneered, “will agree, if you dare to ask her which of us is the more courageous, the wiser. Ask your Queen which of us is more of a man.”

  The King swept off his long robe and stepped off the dais, drawing his sword out of its shining scabbard. Max stepped out to meet him, as if they were two dancers preparing to join hands and move to music.

  “You would still defend the…lady?” Max asked, in such a way that anyone hearing him had to know that he thought she was not one bit a lady. “You still deny what all the world knows?”

  “What the world might think it knows is only because of your poisonous tongue,” the King said. “You dog’s dinner,” he added, in a voice that rang out in every corner. “You perfidious pip-squeak,” he said as the two circled, each watching the other’s face and sword arm. “You ever were our father’s shame,” he pressed, “ever our mother’s misery.”

  They had rehearsed such swordplay for many hours, and Max had his own sword out, his own line ready on his lips. “To think that you”—he studied his father scornfully—“would be king of anything more than your nursery toys.”

  Each knew his steps in the fight. Their audience watched the two swordsmen cross blades, step back, circle one another slowly, each all the while attentive to the expression on the face of the other, as if they could read in the eyes when the strike would be made and from which direction it would come. Thrust and parry, two steps forward, thrust and parry, four steps back. Step and lunge, step back. The sharp blade swept close to an arm, and the watchers gasped. The duelists moved forward, coming closer, until they stood not two inches apart, one sword blocked and held by the other. Max angled slightly, just slightly, to show his father the bag of blood resting against his chest. “Take it,” he whispered, then spoke to be heard by everyone, “Foolish move, brother. You always were the weaker, of mind and skill,” and to keep the eyes on himself, he maneuvered his father around so that the King’s back was to the watchers and only the Queen could see what was happening.

  But his father did not take the sack of blood. His father stepped away, rotating so that now it was Max the watchers could not see. “Stick to the script,” William Starling murmured, and the King cried out, “Now, vermin! Die!”

  In the play, this was the cue for the brother to take two steps back, hold his own sword out before him, and lunge, so that when the Queen’s Man shifted his stance, the villain impaled himself on his adversary’s blade. But that was not the script Max had written for this occasion, so he moved back, sideways, and parried his father’s stroke. “I think not,” he grunted, as if with the shock of the two blades meeting. “It is you who will fall,” he explained softly, once again showing the sack of blood attached to his shirt.

  “Fool!” his father cried, and lunged as if he meant to drive his sword straight into Max’s heart.

  At that moment, the Queen cried out—

  And Max looked back at her, What?

  —A woman’s voice shrieked, “¡La reina!” and a man observed, “She’s fainted!” and someone else, another woman, cried out, “¡El bebé!” and his father’s sword pierced the sack of blood.

  Max had no choice. He was flummoxed. He was helpless. He was furious. He crumpled to the ground, facedown, positioned so that blood would ooze out from under his chest in the direction of the watchers. He had his face turned away from them so he only heard them gasp, “¡El secretario!”

  “Is he dead?” was asked repeatedly in two languages.

  “Has the King killed the Secretary?”

  From where he lay, Max could see only his mother, sunk down into her throne with her head folded over her chest and her hands clutching at the carved silver arms. Her tiara clattered down onto the marble floor, and then two women came and bent over her. Max couldn’t turn his head to see more clearly what was happening to her. Also, he had to keep his gaze a blank. Any soldier would know the living from the dead.

  While Max was stretched out on the ground, and unable to move, something happened behind him. He heard steps pounding forward purposefully. A man cried out, “Enough! Of these murdering kings, enough!” and there was the sound of a sword being drawn. What man? Whose sword? Immediately, there came a sharp, metallic blow and something bounced, clattered, on the floor. But it didn’t ring like a fallen crown.

  “Leash your dog, Carrera,” someone ordered, and Max recognized the General’s voice. What dog? What metal thing had fallen to the ground? Where was the King and what did his father expect him to do now?

  That last question was easy: Play dead.

  But what about Ari and Mr. Bendiff, whose parts had been entirely rewritten? What did his father think he was doing? Max thought angrily. Summoning Max, asking for help, and then not doing what Max told him.

  “Clear the room!” Balcor’s voice ordered, loud enough to drown out all the others. “You, too, Doctor, your services will not be able to help this young man. You, Señora, take the Queen to her apartments and call her servants. Her Majesty must be attended to. If these fools have set off a premature birth…” The voice did not finish the threat.

  Why did the General want the room cleared? What was he going to do that he wanted nobody to witness?

  Ari said, “I will stay here, with what is left of my Secretary,” and it was a voice not to be gainsaid.

  “I will stay with you,” Mr. Bendiff announced.

  “You, no,” the General said. “You…” He hesitated.

  “I stay,” Ari announced, iron and steel.

  “On your own head be it, but you, Señor Bendiff, will witness that he stays of his own free will.”

  “Dead or alive, the young man is here under my protection, Hamish,” Ari said calmly. “You might begin to pack our bags, however, since I sense that our visit here draws to a close. And you might see if there is a coffin to be had—send the boys to ask.”

  General Balcor gave his orders to the soldiers. “Escort the foreigner out of the chamber. See that he gets back to the guesthouse undisturbed.” Or at least, Max assumed those were the orders, since he recognized only two or three of the words.

  There was movement behind Max, there were many footsteps walking away and voices murmuring, but he could see nothing of what was happening. He concentrated on gazing blankly and on shallow, imperceptible breathing. His father’s boots moved into view. The King seated himself on his throne again, and now Max could see how the silver, triple-peaked crown glowed in William Starling’s dark hair. He paid no attention to Max. He seemed interested only in something, someone, standing behind the body. Probably Ari. Probably his father was wondering if Ari would be an ally or a foe in getting free of the General, and Max wished he could cry out to promise him before he made some terrible mistake, “Ally!”

  From the far end of the room, the General spoke to his Captain, not in Spanish. “Malpenso, wait outside with four men. I’ll need them.” Then came the echoing sound of the great doors being closed.

  Nobody spoke.

  Booted footsteps were returning down the long, marble-floored chamber toward the dais; he could hear them, and his father’s legs straightened as he stood up, ready.

  Clap, clap, clap: One pair of hands clapped slowly.

  Clap, clap, the sound coming closer, the footsteps coming closer.

  Max saw the angle of the bloody sword change, as if his fath
er was preparing to use it again.

  The footsteps stopped just before they came to Max. Clap, clap, clap.

  The Rescue

  • ACT II •

  SCENE 2 BALCOR’S PLAN

  The clapping stopped.

  Nobody spoke.

  Max looked in the direction of the King’s boots, with an open-eyed dead gaze. He stared at his father’s boots, which shone like the polished marble floor. His father’s brand-new and very fine boots. Max lay motionless and watched those boots and was furious.

  He was, however, an experienced actor. He had been solutioneering for weeks and weeks, too, which also helped. So he did not jump to his feet to demand of William Starling, “What were you thinking of? I told you to take the blood and die. Can’t you ever let anyone else direct? I had a plan,” he wanted to yell, right into his father’s face.

  It would be useless, he knew. He knew his father. William Starling would either match Max’s fury with a cold fury of his own, because it makes better drama when there are equal opposites onstage, or he would turn it into something comical, and Max could think of at least two ways to do that, comical and therefore ridiculous and not to be taken seriously. Max knew his father too well, and he was too much the experienced actor and Solutioneer to give way to his feelings, but all the same, he was deep-down angry.

  He had no idea what his father had in mind, or what it had to do with The Queen’s Man. He had no idea what might happen next, now that what he had arranged to happen had been rendered impossible.

  A boot nudged against his ribs.

  Max did not respond.

  The book kicked at his hip, not gently.

  The King spoke. “It was a duel, General,” he said, in a voice that combined confidence in the rightness of what he’d done with apology for having done it. “My quarrel with that man—not a good man, not an honest man—goes back—”

  “But not a bad actor,” the General interrupted. “For a boy.”

  Silence spread like spilt milk out from the group of three standing men. Max could almost hear his father’s brain working, the gears separating, then joining up in a new position, spinning. He could have laughed. It served his father right. If he hadn’t been playing dead, he would have laughed…And if the situation hadn’t been so serious, he knew, his father might well have joined in.

  “You might as well get up, young man, and let me look at the damage you’ve done to the floor,” General Balcor said.

  Max rolled over and stood, blood on his shirt, his eyes on the General and not anybody else. Balcor said, “I think you will be the son, Maximilian, although I did think you younger.” Before Max could respond in any way, the General turned to the two men. “How could you think I didn’t remember about the son, William? How could you think I would not see through those ridiculous messages you sent? How great a fool do you think I am?”

  “Not a fool,” answered William Starling, in the voice of Lorenzo Apiedi. “A tyrant.”

  Max had to admire his father.

  “But you”—Balcor turned to Ari—“you I did not expect. You are not an actor, I think, and you may well be a Baron.”

  “I am,” Ari answered, without any apology or excuse or explanation.

  Max had to admire Ari, too. And now Max wondered: Could he admire himself, Max Starling? He hoped so.

  “I’ll see those credentials,” the General said. He held out his hand and Ari passed over the leather file that held Teodor’s letters. They all waited while the General read, slowly, then closed the file and returned it to Ari. “I think Señor Bendiff also is not an actor?” Balcor asked.

  “No,” Ari answered, calmly.

  “You are, then, a genuine embassy. Interesting,” Balcor said.

  “Is she really going to have a baby?” Max asked his father, as if General Balcor was not even in the room with them, as if even if the General was in the room with them he was not someone to worry about.

  “What do you think?” William Starling answered.

  “I don’t know what to think,” Max said, impatient with this acting. “It’s also possible—isn’t it?—that the rumors are correct and she’s being slowly poisoned.” His father received this news with a thoughtful nod. “There was also,” and here Max turned to the General and looked the man in the eye, perhaps accusing him, “a coral snake put in our rooms, hidden in a basket of clean laundry.” Now he, too, became Lorenzo Apiedi, with a gallant, careless smile. “Which I thought was intended for the Baron, but afterward, when there was the matter of a horse…” That story he let Ari tell.

  “A half-broken, hard-mouthed little mare was brought out for an unskilled rider. Which is to say, for Max,” Ari said. “Except, of course, I have had experience of horses and claimed her for myself. It would seem that someone was unhappy to find the King had a brother to add to the line of succession.”

  The General said, thoughtfully, “That news had not reached me.”

  William Starling had not heard it, either. “If these are attacks, and one cannot think of them as anything else, one wonders,” he said, speaking slowly, the Absentminded Professor thinking aloud, “who is behind them. And what that person is after, specifically. Although, in general,” he went on in a vague, thoughtful voice, “it’s clear that profit and power are on the table here.”

  “You will have your suspicions,” the General said to the King.

  “One knows history,” the rather boring Absentminded Professor responded. Then King William of Andesia boldly looked his captor in the eyes. “It is not unheard of for a man, a gifted soldier, to lead a liberating army into a nation which has been ground down under the heel of tyranny, and, when the events have played themselves out, for that man to become the…Governor, or President-for-Life, or even himself the King. And if that soldier had himself some ties to the land…if he was—say—himself the son of a native-born woman? After enough disaster, it would seem natural for him to be asked to assume the rule. Natural, also,” William Starling concluded, now accusing, “for him to be ambitious to rule.”

  “I see,” said the General.

  “Revenge, as well, might come into the play,” William Starling added carelessly. “If a gifted soldier felt slighted, dishonored, for reason of his mixed blood.” Now he played the Queen’s Man, so cool-headed and quick-handed, no one could get the better of him, not with words or the blade, a man fearless for justice and his Queen, the perfect knight.

  “Revenge for a childhood of humiliations, a lifetime of insults?” the General asked, almost cheerfully. “I can well imagine that it might.” He seemed in no hurry to end this interview, and ignored the commotion going on beyond the closed doors.

  It was Ari who insisted, “You will have a plan.”

  “I do. Given this turn of events, I believe I do. Since you are all a part of it, I will share it with you, although it is so simple that you can grasp it easily, dramatist that you are,” to William Starling, “and diplomat,” to Ari.

  Maybe, Max consoled himself, there was some advantage to being too minor a player in the scene to claim anyone’s attention. Such minor characters take no part in action or dialogue, which leaves them free to pay close attention to every word spoken by each of the principal actors, to note every facial expression, follow every gesture, and learn everything there is to learn.

  “I plan,” the General said, “for there to be in Andesia what has never before taken place: a trial. There has been a murder—”

  “A duel,” protested the King. “A fair fight.”

  The General made a dismissive gesture with his right hand. “There has been a death, a death caused by another man’s sword. Now there will be a trial, as there would be in any civilized nation. There will be a public trial and the people will see that when there is law, even the King is subject to it.”

  “Can there never before have been a trial?” Ari asked.

  General Balcor, commander of the occupying army, raised his shoulders and spread his hands, palms up. “Befo
re the mines, before silver and copper and wealth, the people lived in small villages. They traded goods and skills among themselves. When there is nothing to gain by it, why would anyone steal? An alpaca cannot be hidden as can gold coins, in the waistbands of skirts or trousers,” the General pointed out.

  What didn’t the General know? Max wondered. And just what was the General’s purpose, that made a public welcome of this embassy suit him? If Balcor had known all along who Max was and that they traveled with a supply of gold, why hadn’t he spoken out, to unmask them?

  “When the wealth of the mines came to Andesia,” Balcor continued, “it was followed by bands of robbers, their leaders ruthless men who accepted tribute from the mine owners and ruled Andesia by sword; in not much time, a robber captain proclaimed himself King, to rule over Andesia—until the next robber band invaded the city. There is no law in Andesia except the law of the sword, the law of wealth to purchase swords.”

  “You will put me on trial,” said William Starling.

  Ari had been thinking along different, more Euclidean lines. “If,” he began, and he had General Balcor’s full attention, “there is no wealth to be traded, there is no need of formal agreements between buyer and seller, and thus no need of law. If there is no inequality between one man and another, more than nature makes, then there is little room for ambition to grow to monstrous size, and thus no need of law to govern one man’s treatment of another. But if there is wealth and ambition and no law, then who is strongest, or wealthiest, or even the most cruel, can do as he will without fear, and who is weakest and poorest will exist at the mercy of the strongest, and live in fear. He will live without the law’s protections. Those people—all of them—will live by the will and whim of a King, or a Tyrant, or a General. They will live as slaves, as creatures, not the men and women they are.”

  “You understand me,” the General said.

  “You will put me on trial,” William Starling said again. It was not a question.