The Book of Kings

by Cynthia Voigt

  Ari watched the reactions to Juan Carlos’s boasting. Most of them, men and women, had heard all this so often that that night’s claims fell on deaf ears. They continued spooning up their desserts. Except, he noticed, for Captain Malpenso, who smiled and raised a wineglass in a wordless toast to his host, and except also, he now saw, for Elizaveta, seated that evening between the Captain and Jean Luc. Elizaveta’s cheeks were pink and her eyes cast down. In modesty or embarrassment? Ari wondered. She raised her napkin to her lips, though she had not even picked up her spoon. She glanced briefly across to where the General had been placed, between Ari and Mr. Bendiff.

  Ari had been dismayed to have the General join them for the occasion. What could they hope to learn, with Balcor there? Which was, he thought, exactly why the man had joined them. Hamish, he could see, felt the same way—blocked, thwarted, frustrated.

  All during the many courses of the meal, everyone had kept clear of talk about the trial. They had spoken of summer in Andesia, its hot days and cool nights, almost as if the General thought the embassy would not be long gone by then. Mr. Bendiff had involved Juan Luc, Juan Antonio, and General Balcor, too, in a discussion of how to attract tourists, what activities and amenities Andesia could offer. The General was of the opinion that the rigors of the journey between Apapa and the coast made pipe dreams of these ideas, and compared it to Napoleon’s unlucky decision to invade Russia. Noticing her interest, Balcor had asked Elizaveta, “Señorita, why do you think Napoleon, who was a great general, thought he would be able to conquer Russia?”

  Before his daughter could speak, Juan Carlos announced, “He could not know that the Russians would flee before him, cowards that they are, burning their own homes and crops, so that he must starve unprotected in a winter. Burning their own cities, too.”

  “Señorita, do you agree with your father?” the General asked.

  The young woman shook her head. “I think that Napoleon had forgotten that he was a man, not a divine being.”

  “Dear child, why should such a great general think he was in danger of defeat by such a people?” asked Malpenso.

  This she answered quickly. “It seems to me, Capitán, that any general who doesn’t imagine a defeat enters battle unprepared. What is your opinion, General?” she asked.

  At the question, Balcor bowed his head slightly to say, “I think you are not a child, but a young woman with some understanding of the world, and the men in it.”

  As he reported later, when the rescue party had gathered together in the guesthouse kitchen, Ari was surprised by all that, and not least by Elizaveta’s words. “Her father didn’t know what to say. He apologized to both the General and the Captain for her inappropriate behavior. Then, when I told Juan Carlos we would not join him for dinner tomorrow, he became openly displeased. And yet, he knows that, whatever the outcome, we will depart immediately after the trial and must be packed and ready. However, at that point Hamish stood up to make a handsome farewell toast, speaking for all of us, thanking the Carrera y Carreras for their hospitality, which flattered them. He very cleverly— It was clever, Hamish, and not accidental, and you know it. He concluded with a reference to our absent companion, so sadly missed, and suggested we toast the poor lad. And that silenced all objections, because nobody had said a word, all evening, about poor Alexander. Not one word.”

  —

  At breakfast, Max refused to spend another day hidden away in the guesthouse. “You or Colly can take turns staying inside,” he told Tomi. “I’m going with Joachim, I need fresh air, I need…I want to see something new.”

  “Won’t someone recognize you?” Tomi protested.

  “Not in a poncho. Not wearing a chupalla. They’ll think I’m you or Colly.”

  Neither Tomi nor Colly wanted to be housebound, but Max had the ultimate argument: “I need to think.”

  Joachim also wore a chupalla, but since a poncho hampered the movement of his arms, he chose his usual loose shirt. He carried his sketch pad and had a shirt pocket full of pencils, while Max had on his back the rucksack with canteens of water and slabs of bread. Joachim peered into the low grass through which they walked and ignored Max until, “Wait—” he said, and stopped in his tracks. “There’s one. It’ll only take a minute,” and he sat down, opened his sketch pad, took out a pencil, and set to work.

  Max didn’t have a sketch pad. Alexander Ireton was a secretary, Tomi and Colly were servants, so no matter who Max was pretending to be, he couldn’t have a sketch pad. He sat down at a tactful distance and looked around, looked at the sky and the hillsides, the steep mountains and the running rivers, the small city nestled—or huddled? he couldn’t decide—in the valley below. The more he looked, of course, the more he saw.

  He saw the flower Joachim had been searching for, a single bloom, grown low in the safety of the grass, as if in hiding. Yellow petals surrounded the little dark dot of an eye of a flower that really was the color of butter, summer butter, when the cows feed on lush grasses and their milk is especially rich. Joachim drew it, and made notes on the bottom of the page that Max was too far away to read. Then Joachim moved to a position slightly uphill and started to draw the flower again, from a different angle.

  Max breathed in the rain-washed air and felt himself settling down. There was so much to see, so many colors—the stone-gray mountain peaks slicing into a bright blue sky, the sharp green of scrub trees growing up the mountainsides, the browns—so many browns, so different, each from the other—in old dried grass and the mine openings and the roads leading down from the mines and the adobe of the city houses and even, when his eye was caught by a movement, the small herds of alpacas. He hadn’t left the city, but he recognized them immediately from Joachim’s pictures.

  “They look like Sunny,” he said.

  “I’m working,” Joachim answered.

  Max fell silent.

  He tried to think. They had to have a plan to extricate his father from the trap into whose sharp jaws William Starling had shoved them all—and why couldn’t his father just let Max be in charge? For that matter, why hadn’t he just told Max a long time ago about all those gold coins? What kind of a King did his father think he was?—because Max could have told him, if he’d been asked, Not any kind. And what kind of plan could get them all safely out of Andesia now? Max tried to think, but the only idea he had as he waited patiently for Joachim to fold his sketchbook closed was a question. “Did Grammie ever come up here? Did she ever get to leave the city?”

  “She’d like it, wouldn’t she?” Joachim asked. That seemed to remind him, “We should be moving on, it’s been a while. Let’s go explain that we don’t need the wagon after all and then get home.” He rose hurriedly and set off in long strides, going diagonally up across a hill.

  But the woman in the high, solitary homestead shook her head, and insisted that the wagon was Joachim’s. Glad to understand that this boy with him knew her language, she pushed Joachim around the house to a small wooden wagon, pointed at a mule tied nearby, and even thrust the coin he’d given her back into his hand. She shook her head. “After proceso, you will leave. Take wagon. Take mule. Leave Andesia.”

  Joachim turned to Max. “But we won’t need to leave secretly, will we? However things turn out, we’ll go with Stefano’s wagons. Explain it to her, Max.”

  Max turned to the woman to tell her that it was all right for her to keep the coin. But before he could say a word, she grabbed his hand in both of hers and burst into tears.

  —

  When they got back to the guesthouse late in the afternoon, Joachim reported what the woman had told them. “She wanted to hide her children at the bottom of the wagon, among luggage. She wanted us to take them away, take them anywhere as long as it’s out of Andesia. They’ll be safer living in the jungle, she says. Her son is four,” Joachim told them. “The girl is six.”

  “Six?” said Mr. Bendiff in a shocked voice.

  “Only four?” Grammie asked. “Are you sure?” />
  “Why does she want to get rid of them?” asked Ari.

  “The girl’s at the age when children are taken to the mines,” Joachim told them. “And the boy’s going to be six in not very long, and this is their only chance.”

  “Actually, it’s only the silver mine,” Max said. “The littlest children are put to work in the silver mine because the veins are narrowing. The tunnels are small. Little-child sized.” He had been imagining it most of the long walk back to the city. “I don’t blame her for trying to send them with us,” he said.

  “Who takes the children?” asked Ari.

  Max let Joachim have the pleasure—if it could be called a pleasure—of announcing their discovery.

  “There’s one soldier, he comes at dusk, bandanna over his face but in an ordinary soldier’s uniform. It’s always the same one, she told us, but they don’t know his name. But I had sketches,” he announced proudly.

  “Could she identify him?” Colly asked.

  “Well done, Joachim,” said Grammie.

  “Malpenso,” Joachim told them.

  Mr. Bendiff remarked thoughtfully, “One of the reasons Juan Luc is so interested in producing alpaca wool, I think, is something he said to me that first day. Mines give out. He’s thinking ahead, like any good businessman.”

  “Are the mines giving out?” Tomi asked.

  “Just the silver mine,” Ari answered, speaking as slowly and thoughtfully as Mr. Bendiff had. “But I think—I’m right about this, aren’t I, Hamish?—that when Juan Carlos talks, it’s never my mine but always the mines, as if all three of the mines are owned jointly.”

  “Except we know that each cousin only inherited one,” Mr. Bendiff said, “and Juan Carlos took the silver.”

  “But if it’s Juan Carlos who owns the silver mine,” Colly said, “and it’s giving out, he’s got to be running out of money. So what does he have to offer Malpenso for kidnapping the children? To buy him with, I mean.”

  Into the silence that followed this question, Max began to speak. He had thought he wasn’t having ideas when he sat on the hillside, but it had turned out that he was. All during the long walk back to Apapa, he’d been organizing his ideas, and now, with everybody seated at Grammie’s kitchen table, he could set them out, just as Joachim had set out his sketches of the soldiers so that the woman could put her finger down on the sketch of the man who rode off with the children held in front of his saddle, facedown and wailing.

  Max began, “We don’t know what will happen.”

  “Isn’t that the truth?” Mr. Bendiff remarked.

  “Let him talk, Hamish,” said Grammie, so sharply everyone was surprised. Then Mr. Bendiff also surprised everyone.

  “Yes. Sorry.” He nodded, and gave Max his full attention.

  “We don’t know what will happen,” Max said again, “so we need a few different plans.” Then he listed them.

  If his father was found not guilty of murder, they would insist that the King needed to accompany his brother’s body to Queensbridge, where William could explain events to his family and where, also, the Queen could give birth in the care of her own doctors. “That will be up to you, Ari,” Max said.

  Ari nodded.

  If his father was found guilty and sent to prison, “I’ll have to figure out a way to free him and then escape the country. That’ll be up to me. Perhaps the guards can be bribed with gold coins. You take the Queen and return home. Or wait in Caracas if you’d rather, although you shouldn’t wait indefinitely,” he told his grandmother, who nodded that she understood her assignment. “There shouldn’t be any problem taking her with you, if he’s in jail for murder.”

  “What if we stayed on to help you?” asked Tomi, eyes sparkling at the possibility of a heroic adventure.

  “Thank you, but no. It’d look suspicious.” Max reassured them, “I’m dead, which makes me either invisible or a ghost. I’ll do better alone.”

  Grammie grunted an unhappy, wordless agreement.

  “But how can your father be found guilty of murder when nobody was killed?” demanded Joachim.

  Max continued. “If my father is found guilty and sentenced not to prison but to death, then I will come forward. The real problem with that is that I’ll be unmasking a false King and also betraying General Balcor’s part in all of it. Both in making him King and in the trial, too. I have no idea what Balcor might do then,” he admitted. “But we do know what happened to the last royal family. So in case there’s too much…confusion”—which seemed the safest word to choose—“to make any sense out of what’s going on, everybody should follow Joachim up to the farm where the wagon is and I’ll bring my parents when I can.”

  After a long silence, “Was Balcor sincere when he said he wanted law in Andesia?” Ari wondered. “It all depends on that, doesn’t it?”

  “He did seem surprised to hear about the snake,” Max agreed, “and perhaps also about the horse, which we know was Malpenso’s doing. So it would be useful to know who Malpenso is working for. It’s most likely Balcor, but it could be Malpenso acting for himself. Or in the pay of someone other than the General.”

  “Who is powerful enough to get him to betray General Balcor?” Grammie wondered.

  “Or rich enough,” suggested Mr. Bendiff.

  “Don’t forget those countries that sent in the army,” Colly said. “Couldn’t Malpenso be working for them? As a spy, acting in their interests, stirring up trouble, to destabilize Andesia so they can take over permanently.”

  “Whoever it is that’s responsible,” Max said, “if my father is sentenced to death, I’m going to have to come forward and expose the whole sham…And what I ask the rest of you to do is return to the guesthouse and follow Joachim up into the hills. Grammie? You’ll have to bring the Queen.”

  “I’ll help you,” Joachim offered.

  “My hope is that as a diplomatic embassy you’ll be allowed to leave the country. If I can do it, my father and I will join up with you in Caracas. If not…” Max’s voice petered out and he needed a deep breath before he concluded, “You’ll be safe, and the Queen, too, because once everyone knows she’s a false Queen they’ll want to get rid of her. That’s what I think, Grammie. If everything goes wrong, I’m pretty sure it’s the best you can do.”

  Ari reminded them, “There’s no guarantee that our diplomatic credentials will be honored.”

  “They don’t want King Teodor to descend on them with an army,” Max argued.

  “I wonder if a private interview with General Balcor wouldn’t be a better plan,” Mr. Bendiff suggested.

  “He’s already announced the trial,” Max pointed out. “I can’t imagine he’ll go back on that.”

  “I don’t like you putting yourself in such danger,” Grammie said, but Max didn’t have to remind her that either they were all in danger of their lives or just he and his father were at risk. Which was clearly the lesser of two evils.

  “I guess we should do what you recommend,” said Pia’s father, without enthusiasm. But Hamish Bendiff hadn’t gotten where he was by looking on the dark side of things, so he suggested, “Maybe Balcor will pronounce him not guilty.”

  The Rescue

  • ACT III •

  SCENE 1 THE TRIAL

  As the sky turned from silvery gray to a rosy peach to a weak, distant blue, the rising sun spread its light over the plaza and revealed in one corner a tall thing, shrouded in black cloth like a statue waiting to be unveiled. In the corner opposite, water flowed down over the three-tiered fountain, as gentle as the dawn. A solitary figure sat on the rim, chupalla low, poncho hanging loosely over colorless trousers and dirty bare feet. He barely glanced at the carved wooden chair set out at stage left or the tall, straight-backed seat at stage right. He couldn’t take his eyes off the shrouded thing that waited upstage, between them.

  Over the long hours of the morning, the plaza gradually filled. First came soldiers, to line the sides of the space and stand waiting. Then ordinary peopl
e arrived, in families for the most part, wives clinging to their husbands’ arms while small children swirled around their knees, grown sisters and brothers escorting aging parents, and only one or two women alone, as if an entire family had been stripped from them. They were all talking and talking as if they had months of conversation to catch up on, or as if this might be their final chance to say whatever it was they wished to have said to one another. Nobody, not even the liveliest of the children, approached the tall black shape. A wide space lay in front of it, like an empty stage. Max, who had left the guesthouse when the first band of light edged the mountain peaks, watched everything from under his hat, and he listened, and he waited.

  Toward midday, more soldiers arrived. The parade had been canceled because the entire barracks was on duty at the trial. Then, as if a signal had been given—although none had—wandering children were gathered in and the crowd drew back to leave an aisle leading up to the empty stage. Four guards led in the foreign visitors, the Envoy and the man of business first, the rest of their party following at a distance, the two boys and the witch. The Envoy was in his bright uniform and the businessman had on his usual dark suit. The man who drew pictures came last; he wore his paint-stained trousers and blue beret, while the boys wore chupallas and ponchos. The witch was hatless, her gray hair and soft, round body disguising her powers.