by Mark Helprin
Freddy had decided that he had to be king, and that he would, from the ground and unarmed, fight a dozen mounted knights to take the place that God had made for him, because, God having made this place, it would be held open for its rightful occupant.
So when Sir Buster began to gallop toward him from out of the light-woven gloom, Freddy slowly opened his arms and readied himself for the impossibly fast strike that, he knew, can only come from a slow unfolding. The mass of Sir Buster and his horse slipped heavily and quickly across the sand, but to Freddy it was slow motion. The sword made an almost instantaneous clockwise circle in preparation for striking down the serf, but to the serf it seemed to roll slowly through the air, like a Pacific wave moving across blue water in the wind, and he turned as it came, caught it on the flat, and yanked Sir Buster from his horse.
Sir Buster was down. Seeing this, the dead King Bonticue stood up, and said, “Hey! Who did that?”
Long before Sir Buster could catch his breath, Freddy was high once again on a horse. His sense of battle carried from him into the animal like an electric current, and the horse, a huge grey, did what warhorses do under kings, and what no horse had done beneath the rodeo knights at Anglo-Saxon Times since its inception. Nostrils flaring, it reared on its hind legs like the Britannic lion, boxing imaginary enemies before it. And as the spotlight operators went for this as one, all beams converged upon Freddy and the rampant grey. Fredericka’s tray cluttered to the floor.
“Cut the lights! Cut the lights!” screamed the dead king. “He’s just a goddamned serf !”
But the attitude of the horse, and the way Freddy stood masterfully in the stirrups, sword floating in air beside him, magnetised the light, which would not go away no matter how fiercely the dead king commanded. And then, when the horse’s forelegs returned to ground, Freddy took out after the remaining knights. The first was Sir Joey, who nervously rode toward him.
Freddy spurred the grey and bore down on Sir Joey with eyes and sword, and having been a swordsman since he was four, in one fabulous bind he launched the impertinent knight’s weapon like a rocket, straight up. It seemed to disappear, and then came down, point first, to stick in the ground with a thud.
Freddy wheeled the grey about and, like a sailboat smoothly knifing forward through the crests of waves, caught up with Sir Joey and knocked him from the saddle with the flat of his sword. This, however, was only the beginning of a fluid motion that then extended to the next knight in line, Sir Eric Chuck, who went flying like an Olympic diver. Never had anyone watching seen such horsemanship or swordsmanship, as Freddy pursued his destiny and that of his family. His movements were not his, he merely filled them as they appeared before him. But they did require strength, grace, and daring, and these he supplied, running down another line of knights, his teeth clenched, to topple them like tenpins. Riderless horses now pranced around the arena or stood vacantly pawing the ground. As the lights followed Freddy, the audience cheered for him. They had come to hate the knights. They had come to hate the false king. And they wanted Freddy on the throne. They were moved by Freddy’s revolt—which, unlike everything heretofore, seemed real.
Sir Randy, though, had stayed in place, sizing up Freddy and his manoeuvres. This he had learned in rodeo: let everyone else go first, and then you know exactly what has to be done. In no time at all, he was the only one left.
Theatrical to their bones, the spotlight operators highlighted the two combatants and ignored the squealing king, illuminating him briefly now and then because he was too odd to be left entirely in darkness. Sir Randy was immense, and so was his mount. The knight played with his sword, assimilating what he had just seen Freddy do with his. Then he trotted out.
They faced one another from either end of the arena. In a naturally deep voice that carried over the microphones like rolling thunder, Sir Randy asked, “Where did you learn to ride that way, serf?”
In his most elevated Oxbridge manner—not just with voice but with the whole of his body and expression and more than just the sum of its parts—Freddy answered, royally, “Out Utah way.”
The crowd erupted and the horses snarled. “I’m going to take you down so hard, serfer girl,” Sir Randy said, “that you’re going to wish you were Sir Buster’s horse.”
“No,” Freddy proclaimed. “Not you, not you, who would, in your mobile home with flame decals on the side, take Popeel, or any woman, against her will. Not you, not against a real king.”
“We’ll see,” said Sir Randy, lowering his visor and spurring his horse.
Having lost the initiative, Freddy was off second, which he did not like. When they clashed, neither was unseated or separated from his sword, but Sir Randy’s great weight had shaken Freddy as the swords had crossed. Freddy had no time, however, to think about this, and turned the grey for another go.
When they clashed again, Sir Randy lifted Freddy’s sword from him and launched it almost as high as the ceiling. Fredericka clenched her fists and brought them to the base of her neck. The crowd drew in half the air of the room and held it. As Sir Randy wheeled around and began to reset for the killing run, what was Freddy doing? What was he doing, looking up as if beseeching God, eyes fixed on the seemingly unpromising darkness above?
And then, eliciting from the audience a strong and wonderful cheer, Freddy spurred his grey a little forward and to the side, and, with great concentration, extended his arm and caught the silver sword as if it had been sent to him from on high. With a restrained but triumphant smile, he turned, not to Sir Randy, but to all the kings of England in their graves. Every man, woman, and child stood and shouted. Doughnuts were launched inadvertently through the air, and the roar echoed everywhere.
In flew Sir Randy, still courageous, and Freddy rushed to meet him. This time, Sir Randy’s weight would mean nothing, for this time Freddy had in his sword hand—and he knew it—the weight and expectation of a thousand years. When the knight met the king who had been a serf, the knight was thrown from his saddle as if by a catapult. Off he went in a backward arc that ended on the hard sand and took from him all the breath of his fight.
With every light on him, Freddy galloped his horse toward the five-foot-high platform upon which stood the dead king, now muttering into his microphone so that all could hear, “I’m the director, goddamit. I wrote the fuckin’ script. I paid good money for the franchise.”
“Shut up, Frank,” Queen Devore was heard to say. “Can’t you see what’s coming?”
At the end of his gallop, the grey took a leap and flew onto the throne platform, where he collapsed the furniture and hangings but missed the king and queen, who stared silently up at Freddy.
Freddy extended his sword tip to Frank Bonticue’s throat. “Give him the crown, Frank, give him the crown!” Gina advised, and the dead king removed his crown and hung it on the end of the sword.
As Freddy lifted the sword, the crown slid down the shaft. Holding the sword upright, like an escort cavalryman, he left the crown untouched and would not even look at it. Rather, his eyes swept the darkness that was in turn swept with beams of light, and he said in a great voice that hardly needed amplification: “It is my destiny to be king, and I will let no one take that from me. I was born to it and born for it, and I will, in this life, achieve it.”
Like everyone else, Fredericka was transfixed. But, unlike everyone else, she was with him as if their blood and bodies were the same.
A SHORT INTERLUDE ON THE MISSISSIPPI
ALL AROUND THE WORLD, the surf breaks in a ring upon the ocean perimeter, never having been still since the beginning of time, and rolling out more steadily than all the looms of India, or those of Britain that once filled the Midlands with their incessant chatter. Were there a choir of everyone who has ever lived, its voice would hardly be as complex as that of the surf, which in its trillion-trillion-fold mass encompasses all frequencies, variations, and choreographies of water and foam. Pieces of it are thrown about as spray and glitter that catch the light a
s in an infinite glass, and it rocks back upon itself, pausing in scattered silences as new waves rise. But despite its unfathomable variety it heeds the laws that gather it into conforming bales as it rolls across the obsidian waters of the north or over hot turtle-green seas. When the first wave broke upon the first startled strand, it began the never-ending song of the world. Water has long memory and cannot be driven from its original instructions. Even in alpine flumes it stays true as they try to leap their channels, or when the tide rushes up the Thames, or in a flash flood in an arroyo, or off the bows of ships in the ocean, yawls on lakes, or barges on the Mississippi.
The bow wave that preceded Freddy and Fredericka like an endlessly unfurling carpet was the forward declaration of a massive barge train nearly two thousand feet in length and a hundred feet wide. The water was depressed, drawn up in a curve, and then sent out ahead, rising in the light, oxygenated, cast athwart to sink back into the cool Mississippi whence it had come. When the air was anything but perfectly clear, the foam was white with a slight touch of grey, and the water from which it rose was greenish-grey or sometimes brown, but always flowing, with a slightly earthen smell.
Their job was to keep their eyes on the river, looking ahead and to the sides to see those things that a pilot far astern might misinterpret or miss entirely. They would warn off unthinking boaters, because the great barge train could neither stop nor turn except by advance calculation. They would report obstructions and new shallows, and tell everyone astern what the river looked like ahead as they rounded a bend and were thrust into new territory like scouts riding in front of a cavalry column, far in advance of the push-boat as it slid across the water to take the turn.
This was not the first work they did in America, but it was the best. The shore was ever-changing, a world of twisted limbs and bleached tree trunks resting askew on sandbars; of fields under the spray of irrigation machinery that rolled slowly on twenty-foot wheels; of rivers joining the Mississippi like new riders swelling a procession of horsemen; of birds that floated on air cast back by boats and barges; of towns that had died long before but refused to sleep or go under because they could not cease watching the river; of bay-like widenings that promised the sea at the end of flow; of bridges that passed overhead, the bottoms of their decks space-black from a hundred years of coal and diesel smoke; of fields that burned in little worm-like lines of gold wool; of the wind that fed the fires as they crawled across the fields, made safe by the mile of water that stopped their sweeps; and of the progress of the banks as the boat threaded through tangled nature, charging onward and full of the promise of life ahead.
They lived in a little hut mounted on the prow of the leading barge. It had only two single beds and a small bath. But on the ten-foot-wide deck that spanned the width of the barge were some canvas chairs and a little table on which sat a heavy book of bound river navigation charts, binoculars, and the radio with which they reported to the pilot house. Off to the side was a barbecue-smoker on which they cooked their dinners and heated water. In return for pay, accommodations, and passage to New Orleans, they had promised always to keep at least one set of eyes on the river. One would fish or cook, and the other would watch ahead. One would read to the other, or sleep, while the other kept his or her eyes on the river. It was all-absorbing and obsessive, which was perfect for Freddy. They were in the wind day and night, riding upon a white bale of fresh water as if in a wonderful dream.
FREDERICKA HAD ALWAYS feared that were she to have been cleaved from her parents, her estate, her name, class, and connections, she would be lost. Later, sharing in Freddy’s wealth, she had been somewhat reassured by the possession not only of her own ancestral resources but of his. Still, the paradox of receiving an extraordinary living while doing nothing creates a fear that is difficult to convey to commoners, a giddy and nauseating feeling like that of sitting unsecured at the top of Nelson’s Column in a high wind.
One night when Hampton Court had been opened just for them and they wandered its long corridors in their finery, Freddy had told her, “You don’t have power, power has you. Mummy says we suffer the illusion of the axe handle, which thinks it’s powerful because it uses the head of the axe to smash into wood, but hands use the axe handle, which has no real power, and arms use the hands, and the body uses the arms, and so on. Power is a long chain, with each link a captive of the others.”
Fredericka had rightfully been anxious in her high and delicate position, because it was accidental, and because she had to rely on so many people to do things for her. What if they had simply refused? What if the mechanics had refused to fix her car, the maids to clean her halls, the cooks to prepare her food, the police to protect, the drivers to drive, the hairdressers to dress hair? What if her fortune had vanished and she could no longer write cheques? What if the bank, where all these monies were kept, said, “Sorry, we have no record of your holdings”? However many pounds she had in various incarnations were invisibly recorded on a silicon chip in ones and noughts. What if these things simply did not report, or if the people who kept them in trust denied their existence, or hers? “But I have a receipt,” she might say, handing it over to them to prove that she had not just imagined five million pounds on deposit. And then they would tear it up, saying, “What receipt?”
It was the stuff of nightmares that she had had both waking and sleeping, but no longer. Her three jobs in America had forever changed her. No one had known her when she applied for them. The work in each was the kind of thing that her former friends would not know even in dreams. She had been paid in cash that came in little envelopes, and cumulatively the pay was less than she would require to replace her best pair of shoes. She often thought of those shoes sitting on a rack in her windowed American-style “closet,” where they would not get dusty, because the air was filtered. Nor would they mould, because it was dehumidified. Nor would they crack, because the dehumidification was moderate. These shoes would take more money to replace than all that had sustained her, body and soul, quite happily, often joyfully, for almost a year.
On a bright May afternoon, standing on the bows as they slid over the Mississippi, Fredericka threw down a bucket on a line to get water for washing. The bucket hit the surface and bounced, and as it trailed it took on water that she could see frothing and ricocheting inside. As if the rope were attached to a marlin, she tightened both hands, planted her feet squarely on deck, and strained to pull it in. The harder the resistance, the harder she pulled, until the bucket leapt from the water and rose into the air. By the strain upon her body, by her refusal to give up, by her own effort, she had drawn water, and now she stood in the sun. The satisfaction of cleaning lavatories, washing dishes, serving chicken in the dark, or working as a barge lookout was greater than any she had known. Now she understood, from having been high and having fallen, that the very frictions and troubles her peers had unceasingly sought to avoid were the touch of life itself, and she did not want to go back.
As she crossed the deck and was about to pour the bucket of water into a cauldron on the grill, Freddy turned momentarily from scanning the river to glance at her. She was in denim shorts and a blue, floral-print, sleeveless blouse that she had bought at what Freddy called “Wal-Nut” someplace in Minnesota during a spring thunderstorm. She had tied back her hair, and now glorious in the sun it lay across her shoulder like golden flax, touching her collarbone, concaving slightly across the sunburned top of her chest, and then coming to rest on the Bristol blue print. Her eyes were of a deeper, more sapphire blue, and the blouse set them off like a gem in a carefully worked sceptre or crown. She had not worn makeup for months, and some imperfections that Freddy had previously been unaccustomed to now seemed to him to be beautiful—some hardly perceptible facial hairs, blond almost to invisibility, that now he could see; a tiny cup-like indentation to the left of her left eye, a childhood scar that in England he had never seen; her rougher hands, still beautiful, in which there was now obvious strength; the way she carried hers
elf, relaxed and at ease, with more real dignity than she had ever had before. She was content to be unheralded and unknown, which gave her a kind of grace that as a princess she had never possessed.
“Keep your eyes on the river,” she said to her husband. Then she poured the water. As the wind blew her hair back over her shoulder, she raised her left hand, in a kind of salute, to shield her eyes from the glare of the sun. The riverbanks rushed away, and were left behind in the stream. “Freddy, I don’t want to go back.”
“To Chicago?” Freddy asked, sighting a northbound barge train. “Just a minute.” He took the radio from the table and reported: “Approaching navigation, port side, two thousand yards.”
“Roger that,” was the reply from the pilot house. “We see it.”
“Not to Chicago,” Fredericka said.
“England?” Freddy asked, surprised.
She nodded. She did something to her face when she nodded, a drawing in of the lips and a widening of the eyes, that he loved.
“England? You don’t want to go back to England?”
“No. I want to stay in America. I feel so alive here.”
“Didn’t you feel alive in England?”
“No one does.”
“Don’t be absurd. That’s nonsense. Is it because we’re poor here? We can be poor in England, too.”
“After you’re king?”
“Look,” he said, “we can really mess things up if we want. We’d find a way.”
“But it isn’t just that, Freddy. It’s that here the class system is so weak and everything is so big.”
“What’s so big?”
“The whole thing. Look at it,” she said, her arms opening and then dropping as she turned back to him. “I love how vast it is. It totally relaxes me.”
“What would we do here, Fredericka? I’ll soon be too old for this kind of work. I’m taking my last shot. When I was your age I wanted to stay in the army forever, but things change. I’ve always wanted to be strong, fit, and self-reliant, but as I age I appreciate my privileges.”
