Lying there, drowning in the wet earth, I realized that I could hear shouts. Not only shouts, but horses’ hooves also, and gunshots. I rolled over, still lying in the mud, and stared down the street. In that moment—that last moment of stillness—I saw everything as if it was caught in glass. A horse, going at a gallop. On the horse were two people. One was that girl, Anna, their captive. Behind her was the soldier. Lucien’s man, Ahira. Not just a soldier, but the worst of them all. I hated him above all others. I was so angry that the stars shivered, and I saw lightning though there were no clouds. That was why I did it. That was when I decided. And even in that moment, I was praying silently, Don’t let me do this.
I put the rifle to my shoulder. I aimed it at the man’s head. He could not see me, because he had no eye on the right-hand side of his face, and that was the side that was toward me. Still, everything seemed frozen. I couldn’t think. But I didn’t need to. I closed my eyes and pulled the trigger.
Time stopped with that gunshot. “Get to the church!” Ahira gasped in that moment. Then he landed hard in the road. In the darkness of an alleyway, someone moved.
The horse pounded off again. Anna was slipping now, without Ahira to hold her. She lost her grip on the horse’s mane. She tried to turn back to see what had happened, but the horse was galloping faster now. As it turned a corner, she jolted into the air and fell.
She was suddenly on her back in the mud, staring up at the stars. For a moment she made out the English constellations, startled to see them here. Her heart was beating so fast it hurt her, but she was not injured. She lay there, gasping not enough air into her lungs. Then she sat up. The horse had disappeared.
She could see the domed roof of the church below, only a few streets away. She got up and began running, but her legs were weak now. The torture Talitha had inflicted had left her muscles shaking, and as fast as she ran, she could hear the hoofbeats coming closer above her. And gunshots. Anna came out onto the edge of the square, fell to her knees, and crawled into the doorway of a house. After that she did not dare to move. They were closing in, down the alleyway above her. Ahira was shot, and they could shoot her too. There could be snipers on the roofs and machine-gun posts in these dark houses. She could not tell. She glanced around the square, suddenly dizzy, and the stars tracked across the sky as though they were falling.
In that moment, lying there in the doorway, Anna did not think about whether she would die. She was suddenly thinking about powers. About what Talitha had said, and what Ahira had said. Believe that the bullets will miss. It was only forty steps to the door of the church, and she could run that far. She stood up and closed her eyes, still in the shadow of the doorway. And then she ran out into the square.
Someone shouted, but Anna did not turn. She could hear gunshots now, and a strange whistling in her ears, and dull thuds ahead in the wall of the church. She ran faster. One of the horse statue’s ears shattered ahead of her. A gas lamp exploded behind. In a house close by, a child screamed. Then something caught the side of her head and she stumbled. But she was inside the church. Anna fell down and crawled between two pews. And suddenly silence and darkness surrounded her.
I came back suddenly. The anger left me. I was flat in the mud of the street, dazed and shivering, with a rifle against my shoulder. Ahira lay motionless in the road.
In the silence he moved feebly and lay still. Then I realized it: I had shot him. I stopped breathing.
And after that, I don’t remember so well what happened.
I had the stupid thought that perhaps he was not dead. I stumbled over to where the body lay. No. He was dead all right. I was shivering uncontrollably now. I wondered if I was possessed. If someone else had taken me over and ordered me to fire that shot. Nothing seemed real. I sat down beside him in the road and told myself it was only a dream.
There was a gold ring on his finger, glinting in the light of the streetlamps the way my own christening bracelet was. This close, I could even see the lines on that famous man’s hands, and the fine streaks of gray in his hair. I had not shot this man, I kept telling myself. It was impossible.
Then I could hear horses approaching behind, and shouts. Soldiers. I crawled into the darkness of the alley and watched them. They reined in their horses and leapt from them, talking urgently. I got to my feet without knowing what I was doing and staggered back up the stairs.
I collided with someone at the apartment door. It was Maria, asking what was going on. I was shaking and I could not stop. The darkness outside the window was thick with gunshots. Grandmother got to her feet and came toward me. “I can hear the soldiers talking out there,” she told us urgently. “They will come to take me away. I am not mad! Maria, they want to take me away, after all that has happened already.” And she began to cry again. Maria put her arms around Grandmother, her eyes on me as I moved about the apartment with that rifle in my hand.
“Leo, you are covered in mud,” Maria said. “What is it? What did that soldier want, the one who was here earlier? Your grandmother did not say.”
Grandmother was explaining, her voice choked and quavering. “Come up to my apartment,” said Maria. “They will not find you there, Mrs. North. My father is back and he won’t let them in.”
Grandmother nodded slowly, blinking the tears out of her eyes. “Thank you, Maria.” She turned to me. “Leo, will you fetch me some clothes?”
I was dreaming again, worse than ever. Nothing was real and I did not care. I fetched clothes for her, and a thick shawl. The night was warm, but my own skin felt as cold as steel and she was shivering too. In my head, seconds were counting down relentlessly all the time. I thought of soldiers battering down the door, to take her to a center for Unacceptables, or to take me to prison. Because I was a criminal now, a murderer. I had killed that man.
I shook my head, pressed my fingers into my eyes until I saw white lights in my forehead, and forced my hand to release the gun. The clattering on the floor made Grandmother start. And me, even though I was the one who had dropped it. Maria was staring at me anxiously. I picked up the water jar from the table, trying to behave as though there was nothing wrong. But on the way back to the kitchen, a fit of shaking came over me, and I dropped it. It shattered on the floor.
“Oh, Leo!” Grandmother exclaimed. “That will be expensive to replace!” She sounded almost like her usual self, and it was the more ridiculous after what had just happened. “Why can you not be more careful like …?” She trailed off. She had been going to say “like Stirling.”
“Leo,” said Maria quietly. “You are not yourself. Come upstairs and sit down for a while. Or tell me what is wrong.” She went on watching me. “Do you just need to sit by yourself?” she said. “Is that it?” I nodded, trying to reassure her. I could feel my teeth rattling against each other. “I will be back in a minute,” she said. “I will just help your grandmother upstairs.”
When she had gone, I picked up the rifle again. I pulled back the bolt to reload it, then realized that there were no more bullets. That had been the last. I almost laughed at that, though it was not funny. Then I thought of something. I went to the bedroom and opened the window seat chest. Underneath that private’s uniform was the pistol, still loaded. I took it out, checked the safety catch, and put it into my pocket.
I went out and down the stairs, keeping tight hold of the handrail to stop myself from falling. I tried to force myself not to look at the place where Ahira had landed, but my eyes moved to it by themselves. The body was gone. There was a dark patch where the blood refused to combine with the mud and disappear. I think I would be able to walk to that place even now and find to the nearest inch where he landed. It was burned on my mind already and I could not erase it.
I heard gunshots in the city. They were becoming a familiar sound, as though they were part of the weather. Smoke was rising from somewhere. The stars overhead were very clear, drifting over the sky as I walked; the buildings looked more solid in the moonlight than anything real, l
ike an empty stage set. Everything looked like that. As I walked, I began counting the steps I took. Then the Voice spoke to me. “Go back,” it said. “Go back to Maria and wait until you are calm. Don’t go on walking.” I ignored it.
The gunshots in the city had subsided when I reached the graveyard gate. As I stood there, the deserted graveyard seemed endless, the city back across the bridge more than infinity. Stirling’s grave was the only safe place. I found it and knelt beside the wooden cross. The moonlight was falling across the grass and shadowing the letters of the inscription. It was only then that I really thought of Stirling. Before that I had hardly been thinking at all. And I began to realize what I had done.
I could not stay there; I had to go on walking. I decided suddenly to go to the hills. No one would find me there. I walked, without thinking, away from the city.
It must have been nearly dawn when I stopped, though it was still as dark as ever. I was out of hearing of the church clocks in the city now. The last time I had heard them, they had chimed three. I was too tired to go on. I collapsed on the grass and stared at the stars.
I felt nothing—but I would, soon enough, and I knew it. All the way from the city, I had been trying to tell myself that. I had shot Ahira—really shot him; it was not just a dream. I could do nothing to change it. My life was ruined and there was no way to repair the damage that was done. And if I went back now and tried to carry on as if things were normal, I would have to know every day that I had shot him. The same way I knew every day now that Stirling was gone. I could not go back. It was too much; I did not have the strength.
I sat up and took the pistol out of my pocket. I emptied out the bullets and counted them, then put them back in and took off the safety catch. It would be an easy thing to do. You can pull the trigger of a Delmar .45 with your little finger. It would be easy even to pull it by accident. Perhaps that would be the best way, I decided. Continue thinking, and then pull the trigger while I was not concentrating on doing it, so I would not think of the pain. I was always frightened of pain. I’d never have made a soldier.
I put the gun against my head. I tried to summon the strength to do it. Just enough strength to pull the trigger, and that would be the end of it. The real end this time. I closed my eyes.
In the forest, Aldebaran and Ryan were kneeling motionless. Ryan started up then. “Did you hear that?”
“What?” said Aldebaran, making no attempt to hide the tears running down his face.
“There was a sound, Uncle. Up by the old chapel.”
Ryan ran ahead. Aldebaran followed him. They reached the door of the chapel and stood in silence. There was someone lying inside. “Anna,” said Ryan then. “Anna, Anna.” He ran to her and took her head onto his knee. He put his hand against her face and it came away dark with blood. He was crying now himself. “Help me, Uncle!” he shouted.
Aldebaran fell to his knees beside Anna. “She is breathing,” he said. “These are only surface wounds.”
Aldebaran picked Anna up and they started down through the forest. She woke and saw his face and tried to tell him something, then closed her eyes again. Ryan was praying. “Run ahead and call an ambulance,” Aldebaran told him.
Anna opened her eyes when they reached the shore of the lake. The stars were beating in time with her heart. And then they went dark.
In that strange country, the moon rose from behind a cloud as though it was gliding. It illuminated every tree and every ripple of the lake and shone down on the ambulance that was moving along the road beside the waters. And over the Malonian eastern hills—over another, smaller valley—the moonlight grew brighter and sharpened to the same color, as if there was no division between the worlds anymore.
In the days after Ahira was assassinated, a hundred people would claim that act for themselves. Perhaps they were right. It was not really mine. It was as though someone else took control of my arm and my mind. I must have spent half a second aiming the rifle, but the bullet struck true. And Ahira fell, a long way away. I could almost have believed that it was someone else who shot him.
But I must be honest: in that half second when I aimed the rifle, I knew what I was doing. I felt as though things had become clear to me. It was not Ahira who I shot at, not only him. It was Sergeant Markey, for what he said about our mother, and the truancy officer who drove me back to school with threats, the sergeant in Ositha binding my hands tight enough to cut them, the men who closed the city and would not let me go to my brother’s grave, the two who knocked Grandmother down in the mud, the private who brought that warrant to the door and looked at us as though we disgusted him. And I fired the shot because they drove me to it. They brought it on themselves. That was how I felt in that half second of stillness. As though it was not me but him who was responsible.
The dawn will be rising soon, and still I sit here reading. You must be asleep by now, thinking that I have gone home. Or perhaps you are watching at a window. It is the darkest point before the sun rises, and I am the only one left now. The balcony is silent.
I remember how the city looked that night when I ran to the hills, strange and distant and too solid. I did not realize what I had done, not then. I have had enough time to realize it since. I wrote this because you asked me why I did it. You asked me to explain.
I would not have shot Ahira if Grandmother had not wandered out that night. If those soldiers had not come at that exact minute, when I was already desperate. If I had kept my mouth shut and not sworn at them. Even after everything, after Stirling was gone, I might not have done it. Was it just chance, then? I don’t know. In that moment, when everything stood still, I hated Ahira. Maria told me I would never get to hate him as much as she did. She was wrong. I did. I don’t know why.
I don’t have the heart to read on, but if I don’t, I’ll have to let you read this. And I can’t do that yet. Not after so long. I will read to the end, now that I have started. I cannot think what else to do anymore.
Out in the hills I sat up suddenly, without knowing why I did it. There was someone close by.
I let my finger fall from the trigger of the pistol, but left it resting against my head. A girl was moving along the other side of the valley. The moonlight turned her eyes to silver and carved deep shadows in her hair. Everything had brightened suddenly. The stars above made the whole sky clear blue; the stream shone like liquid silver. The moonlight was streaming through that small valley, flowing over the girl on that side and me on this side and every blade of grass between us. Even my own hand on the gun was shining. It made me dizzy. I sat motionless, watching her. Then she turned and saw me. “What are you doing?” she said. In the silence her voice carried clearly.
I realized suddenly that she was the girl I had seen with Ahira, the girl who had been haunting my dreams for weeks. “Anna,” I said, standing up. I watched her in silence, and she gazed back at me across the valley, a ghostly figure shining in the dark. “Are you an angel?” I said then. She didn’t answer. “Who are you, then? The Voice?”
“What voice?”
“Are you a spirit? Are you dead?”
“I don’t know anymore,” she said.
“How can you not know?”
And then I realized that I didn’t know anymore if I was dead either. Perhaps I had actually pulled the trigger. It’s easy to shoot even when you don’t completely mean to do it. Just a trigger you can pull with your little finger.
And when I thought of that, the hills vanished and Ahira was falling to the ground again. It was not just a vision—it was really in front of my eyes, and closer than before. I shook my head. It wasn’t me who fired that shot, I thought then. It was someone beyond the control of my mind. I didn’t order my hand to shoot, or will the bullet to fly straight. Perhaps a real soldier had been hiding close by in the dark and had fired at the same time I had, someone who could shoot faultlessly and was used to killing.
“What are you doing?” Anna said again, away on the other side of that small valley.
I blinked and remembered where I was: out in the eastern hills in that strange bright moonlight, not lying in the mud watching Ahira fall. I didn’t answer.
“Don’t shoot yourself,” she said.
I tightened my grip on the gun. “You can’t stop me,” I told her.
“Take that gun away from your head.”
“Why? No one would care if I did this.”
“How do you know?”
I shrugged. “There are some things you just know.”
“Take the gun off your head. Please.”
I did it, but partly because my arm was aching. She was walking down the hillside toward me now. I hesitated, then began to walk down to meet her. “Why were you doing that?” she said. “Please tell me.”
All the time we were walking toward each other, she did not take her eyes off mine. I told her everything that had happened in the days since Stirling had been gone. And then we were facing each other across the stream. I stopped still. The moonlight was caught inside the water; the stream was carrying it along in a bright channel. I switched the pistol from my right hand to my left and then back again. “Are you going to try to stop me?” I said.
She shook her head. “I can’t stop you.”
“What are you doing out here in the hills?” I asked her.
“I don’t know. Maybe I’m dying. Everything went dark and now I’m here.”
I ran my fingers over the cold barrel of the gun without really noticing it. “This isn’t heaven,” I told her.
“No.”
Time passed. The water went on flowing between us. After a while I sat down on the bank, and she knelt opposite me. I stared up at the stars. They seemed to be sliding on their courses, as if they were not anchored anymore. “Do you even believe in heaven?” I asked her.
The Eyes of a King Page 32
