The Eyes of a King

by Catherine Banner

  At that moment we heard Grandmother’s key in the door. “Quick—hide it!” whispered Stirling. I shoved the book back into the chest of drawers, and when I went into the living room, Stirling was talking innocently to Grandmother about some incident at school. I could not help smiling at that. For all his goodness, he could be very like me.

  We had just started dinner when there was a sharp rap on the door. Grandmother went to open it anyway. “Ethan Dark,” I heard. “Truancy officer.” I turned in my chair. The man was standing right on the threshold, glancing from me to Grandmother behind those reflective glasses. “Are you the legal guardian of Leonard North?” he demanded.

  “Yes.” She wasn’t, but she said it anyway.

  “Are you aware that he has failed to attend school today after a previous warning?”

  Grandmother tried to explain about the incident the week before in training, but he waved it aside. “Yes, I know about all that. So why is he still at home?”

  “There is a lot of silent fever about,” Grandmother said. “I don’t want him to catch the germs. They say that if you are suffering from exhaustion—”

  “Mrs. North,” the man said wearily. “We are all in difficult circumstances. But we cannot just hide in our houses. There is a war going on, and there are more profitable things that I could spend my time on. I do not wish to come here again.”

  “But the headmaster of Leonard’s school has said—”

  “That is of no consequence. As another member of staff pointed out to us, Leonard has failed to obtain a doctor’s note.”

  “But there are no doctors to obtain a note from.” That was outspoken for Grandmother. I got up and went to stand behind her, and Stirling followed me.

  “Then I suggest he gets himself back to school with all due haste,” said Ethan Dark. “He has been warned already. If I receive another complaint from the military academy, there will be serious consequences. Last year we expelled over a hundred boys for consistently failing to attend military training. They have lost all chance of a career in the army now. But when they reach eighteen, they are still going to be called up to fight at the Alcyrian border as civilian soldiers. Evidently not where Leonard wishes to end up.”

  “Very well,” she said after a moment. “He will be in school tomorrow.”

  “Thank you,” the man said, and turned and marched down the stairs.

  While we were all still standing at the door, Maria came jogging down with what looked like baby sick on the front of her dress. “Look what Anselm did, bless him,” she said through gritted teeth, holding up a slimy hand. “Who was that?”

  “Ethan Dark, truancy officer,” I recited. “He loves saying that.”

  “Shh, Leo,” Grandmother said, but the man was already gone.

  Maria laughed, and when she did that, I saw suddenly that she had been crying. I could see it in the way her smile faded and the glitter of her eyes. “I suppose you will be going back to school, then,” she said to me. I nodded.

  “You will have to,” said Grandmother. “You could be expelled, Leo!”

  “Don’t listen to him,” I said. “It’s only Sergeant Markey stirring up trouble.”

  “You were getting bored at home anyway,” said Grand-mother.

  “Now that I have to go to school, I don’t want to,” I said. “I’d sooner stay at home.”

  “Ah, well,” Maria said. “At least you are not stuck at home forever with a demon baby.”

  “True. But he will not be a baby forever.”

  “That’s also true.”

  “And there is the picnic to look forward to,” I said.

  “Are you coming?” said Maria. “You didn’t seem very keen before.”

  “I’ve come round to it,” I said. She smiled at that.

  “What is this about a picnic?” asked Grandmother when Maria had gone on down the stairs and we had returned to the cooling dinner. Stirling explained.

  “I don’t know,” said Grandmother. “The soldiers march through there on the way to the border. What if they practice shooting? Or what if stray explosives fall there?”

  “The war is miles away,” I told her. “We are not going to go far. We will just go through the graveyard and beyond that a short distance. Explosives cannot travel fifty miles through the air.”

  Stirling looked relieved when I said that. Grandmother put down her spoon and frowned into the soup. “But what if the soldiers don’t let you back into the city? Remember last time, when you thought it would be so smart to go walking along the river, and then when you tried to get back in, you were nearly shot.”

  “I wasn’t nearly shot,” I said. “And that was years ago. It’s different now. There are barely any controls on the bridges anymore; you’ve read it yourself in the newspaper. Lucien pulled his men back to the castle and now he doesn’t care.”

  “I’m still not sure,” she said. Stirling glanced at me but did not speak.

  “How about … How about I wear my soldier’s uniform?” I suggested suddenly. “Then there will be no trouble at the bridges. They will know I am no revolutionary.”

  “I did say I’d never let you out of the city again,” she said slowly.

  I knew I was winning now. “You are going to have to relent sometime,” I told her.

  “I don’t see why.” She smiled. “You must really want to go on this picnic if you are prepared to wear your uniform during the weekend.”

  “Yes, I really do.”

  She hesitated, then nodded. “All right. It is a good idea, after all. You never get any fresh air, you boys; it is no wonder you were so tired last week.”

  I began to clear the empty bowls off the table. She put her hand on my shoulder and looked at me for a moment. “What?” I said.

  “You’ve changed, you know, Leo,” she said. “I cannot remember the last time you got so enthusiastic about something. You’ve changed for the better since that day you fell ill.”

  “I know it.”

  I was lying in the mud of the yard, leaning on my elbows and looking down my Maracon 14. It was one of the more beaten-up guns: the bolt had a tendency to stick and then fly back suddenly, catching your fingers. I had forgotten how you had to be quick to get the new ones at the beginning of shooting drill.

  I was facing directly east, and the sun was not quite yet overhead, so I had to squint to see the target. That is, a chalked cross on the heart of a warped board that was roughly human-shaped and painted dull green—the color of the Alcyrian army uniform. My mind wandered; I thought of the empty hills, through those layers of drab houses, and Saturday, when we would be going there.

  “North! Wake up!” It was Sergeant Bane. He sounded as if he had said it more than once already. North—that was me. There was some raucous laughter from the other boys.

  “Er … sorry, sir, I—”

  “Fire, North!” he shouted before I got the words out. I pulled the trigger hastily, and the bullet skittered off somewhere near the bottom of the board. We did not fire with real bullets, of course, and I had always thought that with real bullets it would have been a lot easier to shoot straight.

  “Bullet collecting, North,” Sergeant Bane told me as he shepherded the boys inside again. “You need to learn to apply yourself.” I did not even pretend to mind. Bullet collecting was tedious in winter, when the yard was waterlogged and the wind bit sharply, but now it was summer and I would rather be outside.

  A breeze was blowing in from the east. Alone in the yard, I wandered round by the far wall, picking up the fallen bullets. The clouds were rolling across the sun in rags, so that it seemed bright and then suddenly overcast, and then bright again, and their shadows were projected onto the mud.

  I liked shooting drill, though I did not admit it. In my more vindictive moments, I used to move the rifle a fraction of an inch toward one of the other boys or Sergeant Bane and then imagine that I was going to turn it suddenly and shoot him dead. I could have done, I used to tell myself. Although the b
ullets couldn’t kill easily, and I had not such a good aim as to hit the target every time. But I had changed now, I realized. Everything had been different since that day when I had collapsed in training and woken up in the colonel’s office.

  I hated school—of course I did—but I could not help but think that things were improving. I had realized my blessings, for one thing. Grandmother had changed too. Since that day, she had not nagged me once about anything. She had kept me at home in spite of the truancy officer, and she was letting us go on this picnic on Saturday. I could not remember arguing so little with her since my mother and father had gone away. And there was Maria. I had not had a single friend before now. There was something calming about her, the fact that she was nearby, that made me think before I acted. Maybe it was the need to impress. I never cared what everyone else thought of me. But I wanted her to like me. I did not want to act in a way that she would despise.

  In history class, we were studying the Liberation again. At the moment we were concentrating on the Iron Reign—the rule of the royal family of Donahue—the very same era referred to as the Golden Reign by my father’s book. I felt the old sense of frustration with school returning. It was stupid. It was a waste of time to teach Malonian history like this. They should just tell us the facts and let us decide for ourselves, I thought.

  “Gone was the old regime!” Sergeant Bane was declaiming. “When King Lucien overthrew the dictatorship our country had known for so long, he brought equality back. Everyone now has the chance to work and fight for their own country, and vote for their own government. He has made Malonia a land of which we can be proud.” He glanced over the class as he spoke, and I assumed a look of disparaging boredom. “North!” he said. “Name one thing that was done away with when King Lucien’s army brought an end to the Iron Reign.”

  “King Cassius the Second,” I said.

  “No!” he said. “Wrong!”

  “Well, actually, technically—”

  He cut me short. “Raise your hand if you want to hear what North has to say.” No one did. “Thank you, North,” he said. “May I continue?” I did not bother to reply.

  Sergeant Bane’s speech dragged on. I stared out the window and looked for shapes in the clouds. But I could not find any; they were moving too fast. The yard was bare except for an apple core lying in the mud, and I fell to frowning at it and trying to make it lift into the air. I had tried that with objects before, and it worked if I concentrated hard enough. I managed to make the apple core rise an inch or two. I could not keep it there for long, though; it was like holding your breath. When I let it drop, my brain hurt, as if it had endured great pain. It was very strange. Magic is not miracle at all; it is just effort and willpower.

  My father used to tell me about it when I was a little boy. The training the great ones took was based on physical exertion, and even torture. The best were able to smile while plunging their hands into boiling oil. Really smile, not grimace, and that is a difficult thing to do. And they concentrated so hard that they were protected by their willpower, and so there were no burns or scald marks on their skin, though they still felt the pain.

  I was thinking about that all the rest of the day—magic and willpower—and Sergeant Bane’s lecturing passed me by. On the way home from school, I remarked on it to Stirling. “Do you remember about the great ones, the ones who train in magic?” I asked. “How they can endure torture?”

  “Yes,” he said after a moment. “I think so. You used to tell me stories….”

  “That’s right.” I used to tell my father’s stories to Stirling after my parents left. Those were not Grandmother’s sort of stories.

  “I remember,” he said.

  “I was thinking that it’s strange how it works,” I said. “They rely on their minds—their willpower and strength of character. They don’t do miracles. Anyone can do magic.”

  “Yes. They just believe that they can do something and they can. Like those ones that used to bend iron bars. They just believe they are bending a straw, don’t they? That was what you told me.”

  I nodded. “I suppose you have to have the right mentality. Not everyone can do impossible feats. If you started to doubt yourself, you would not be able to do it.”

  “And not everyone has enough willpower,” said Stirling.

  We walked on down Paradise Way. Then Stirling said, “Speaking of the great ones, I want to see Aldebaran’s grave again one day. I can’t remember what it looks like. And I think it’s pretend—a pretend gravestone.” When I did not answer, he continued, “Because he was exiled. Talitha sent him to England.”

  It was true that the grave was made a long time after he had disappeared. I did not remember Aldebaran, but I remembered when the grave was made. And it was also true that nobody had thought he was dead for sure until the rumors started spreading. “They say he died in prison,” I told Stirling. “He had been in a secret prison for several years.”

  “How do you know that’s true?” Stirling said.

  I didn’t. “All right, why don’t we go and see the grave?” I said. “Let’s go and see it now.”

  “Now?” said Stirling. “I don’t know if we should. You were tired last week after you got ill in training. If you do too much today, you will be tired again tomorrow.”

  “Well, I might be dead tomorrow,” I said. Stirling looked confused. “All I mean is we can’t just keep worrying about tomorrow. If you want to go and see it, we will go and see it. Today. Now. Come on.” And I turned down a side street.

  “What about silent fever?” Stirling asked, trotting after me.

  “Stop worrying.”

  “You know what you are, Leo?” he said. “Repulsive.”

  “Repulsive? What are you talking about? You mean impulsive.”

  “I mean you only just had the idea and already—”

  “Come on. You wanted to see it.” He laughed and followed me.

  It was about two miles to the graveyard. We walked briskly. “Are you sure this is a good idea?” Stirling would ask at intervals, and I kept replying, “Yes. Don’t worry.”

  “I think we are going the wrong way,” he said a couple of times.

  “We will get there anyway,” I told him.

  As we got nearer to the edge of the city, the streets grew wider, and the breeze stronger. “We’ve come completely the wrong way,” Stirling told me.

  “You’re right.”

  “Stop walking, then. Should we turn around?”

  “Let’s keep going until we get to the wall. And then we can follow it round to the graveyard. It will not be far.”

  I couldn’t remember ever being in this part of Kalitzstad before. I could tell the houses here were not divided into apartments: all the curtains in any one house matched each other. Some even had gardens about them. And there were no soldiers here at all. There was never any trouble in a place like this; this was as still as the realm of the dead.

  “It would be boring to live here,” said Stirling. “It’s so quiet and pressing.”

  “You know,” I told him, “sometimes boring is good.” But I knew what he meant. There was a thick atmosphere of stupefying wealth and conformity and safety that hung in the streets like damp, soaking even into your brain. I would rather have lived here than Citadel Street—of course—but you’d never feel alive. I did not believe in the people who lived in these perfect houses. Living here, you’d wake in the morning and wonder if your feeble heart had faded in the night, never having anything to beat against. That was what I thought. And then I thought about the hot water and the carpets in the bedrooms and the streets empty of soldiers and was not certain. We had lived like this once, and I still remembered faintly.

  Suddenly, abruptly, we came to the city wall. It continued this way all around the city island, lower than Stirling’s height and two feet thick, no more. The city needed no defense beyond the river. The wind lifted over the wall and caught us face on as we approached.

  We strolled ov
er and leaned against the wall, looking out into the hills over the wide gulf of the river. “It’s nice,” I said indifferently. “I would not mind living here.” But really, I could have stood there forever.

  The houses behind us looked as if they should face others on the opposite side of an ordinary street. But instead, across the cobbled road there was only the wall, and beyond that, space. The whole street was built of clean gray stone, leaning out like the side of a ship. The buildings here were not old; the oldest in the city were made from the volcanic rock of the island itself.

  I leaned over to look down into the gulf, and Stirling caught my arm, exclaiming, “Be careful, Leo!” The river was at least sixty feet below. The dirty water flowed fast, darkened by the shadow and the red reflection of the cliffs. But there was a beauty in the volume and power of the water foaming over rocks as it ran southward.

  Stirling was still tugging my arm. “Leo, stop leaning over like that,” he said. I stopped and looked out over the sunlit eastern country instead. On the other side of the gulf, lower than the city, ran the Circle Road. Four soldiers on horseback were cantering around it toward the north end of the city. We could see the Northeast Road from here, a straight line drawn across patchy farmland. Just before it slipped into white mist, I thought I could see Ositha, the halfway point between Kalitzstad and Romeira. And to the east were the hills, fresh with their new coat of summer grass and spotted with white flowers. The sun spread from behind us, over our heads, out across the country, and flushed the distant Eastern Mountains with lilac.

  “It was all right to come here without Maria, wasn’t it?” said Stirling.

  “Yes. I mean, we’ve seen it before.”

  “But I didn’t remember it as beautiful as this.”