The Children of the King

by Sonya Hartnett

  Cecily said blandly, “Well we can see you.”

  “We need your help,” said May.

  The boy gazed at the girls. Seated in the dirt, his cloak rucked around him, he looked like an exquisite puppet who’d been dropped onto the floor. Surprising them, he said, “There is grief between you — you, and you. You have been hurting each other.”

  “No we haven’t,” said Cecily.

  “It’s all right now,” said May. “We’ve stopped.”

  “Good. You have been sent here together, as we have. Forgive. Forget.”

  “We have,” Cecily assured him.

  “We’ve come because we need your help,” May said again.

  “Mine?” The boy’s lip curled. “I can’t help you. I am no help to anyone. In everything I’ve tried, I have failed.”

  “You’ve looked after your brother all this time,” Cecily pointed out, adding, “Better than I’ve looked after mine.”

  “Cecily’s brother has run away,” May explained. “We think he’s gone to London.”

  The boy glanced at his sibling who had risen to his knees, watchful as a blackbird. “What has this to do with us? It has nothing to do with us.”

  “Everything is connected.” May whispered the words like an incantation which would unlock an unseen door; and indeed the brothers twitched as if she’d trodden on their toes. “We are here because you are here.”

  Cecily hesitated, then edged a step closer, hands clasped under her chin. She really didn’t know what to believe about these boys. Though their voices were clear and their clothing elaborate and their curls and pink skin soapily clean and alive, there came from them a feeling of thinness, as if they existed under a cold blue light and could not step away from its beam. There came from them a nothingness that was like the air in a cave. She couldn’t believe, but she could believe. She drew a breath and said, “It does have something to do with you. You’re children, just like us — just like all children, ever. You’re frightened and brave, but other children are frightened and brave too. May is. The children in London, they are. You’ve never been the only ones to feel this way.”

  “I think,” said the boy, “we have been more frightened, and had to be braver, than most.”

  May bit her lip, peering over the stony distance that could not be crossed. “Jeremy wants to be as brave as you. That’s why he ran away.”

  “He is good and gentle,” said Cecily.

  “He wants to do something noble —”

  “A worthy ambition.”

  “— but it makes me worry we won’t see him again. It’s what happens sometimes. Sometimes, the noble thing is the last thing. And after that you never see the person again.”

  A breeze went around the ruins, tousled the brothers’ long locks. The child shuffled close to whisper in his sibling’s ear. The boy nodded, smiled sadly at the evacuee. “Is it Jeremy you wish returned,” he asked, “or somebody else?”

  “Him!” said Cecily. “Who else is there?”

  May’s heart was beating hard. She took a step forward, the earth clinging to her feet and trying to hold her back, not wanting its little girl to go. “You could find him, couldn’t you? You could speak to him.”

  The child looked owlishly at his brother. The boy did nothing for a moment. Then he stated, “We can’t leave here.”

  “Have you tried?”

  “Don’t ask me if I’ve tried! I tried my best every day of my life. We were sent here. We had no choice. We are watched. We cannot leave. We are imprisoned!”

  The girls shied from his temper. The earth bubbled and wheezed. May said, “Where’s your prison? I don’t see it. All I see are fallen-down stones and weeds. There’s no lock. There aren’t any chains. You see something that doesn’t exist.”

  “No one but us knows you’re here,” said Cecily. “No one is watching you except birds.”

  “You’re not prisoners,” May told them. “That’s all finished. If you want to, you can just walk away.”

  The brothers stared. In the sunlight they wavered, grew milky, were solid again. The child squeezed the older boy’s hand. “I would like to see Mama,” he said.

  His brother ignored him, muttered, “You speak as if it would be simple.”

  “It would be! Wouldn’t it?”

  “We are accustomed to this place. We are part of it now.”

  “But this is a sad forgotten place —”

  “Is that how you want to be?” asked Cecily. “Sad and forgotten?”

  “Please, brother,” pleaded the younger one. “Let’s escape! Let’s adventure! I would rather a terrible adventure than to stay here for ever and ever.”

  The older boy smiled morosely, and turned away. If the wind blew cool through his linen shirt, he did not shiver. He looked back, and his grey eyes were tired and angry. “And if we did as you say and left this place, and if, in our travels, we were to see this boy Jeremy, what are we to do with him?”

  “Send him home!” yelped Cecily.

  “Protect him,” said May.

  The boys glanced at each other. “I want to see Mama,” the smaller said again.

  The elder winced with indecision. “If we leave here, we must go far, far,” he said. “It might be dangerous. And I am duty-bound to keep my brother safe.”

  “You do keep him safe,” said Cecily. “Look at him, he’s well. He’s almost too well. You’ll always know how to keep him safe. You’re the big brother.”

  The boy’s shoulders fell; he reluctantly smiled. He looked into his sibling’s eager face, reached out and closed his hand around the child’s paw. “If we leave this place,” he said, “it will mean accepting there is nothing for us here, and that we must say goodbye. But we are only children. I don’t mind for myself, but — my brother is a little child. He should have been allowed to stay, and grow up, and grow old, as others have done. It isn’t fair. It isn’t the way it’s promised to be.”

  He wiped his hand across his face, a hand which was ghostly in its delicacy, a face like that of a grieving angel. May and Cecily watched with paining hearts. The decrepit drip of water dripped — paused — dripped — paused again. The child hung his head in a silence deeper than a sea.

  It was May who spoke. “Isn’t it better to say goodbye and go, than to stay as prisoners forever? Isn’t it better to leave a place where you don’t belong?”

  The boy shook his head hopelessly. His brother shuffled near until their knees touched. When the boy lifted his face, his eyes were filled with tears. Cecily had the strange thought that the tears were like diamonds, ancient and cold. “We are afraid to leave,” he confessed. “I am afraid. Life was one way, and suddenly it was another. There was light, and then there was not. Nothing can be trusted. It has made me afraid.”

  May said, “I don’t think you need to be afraid. I think you’ll be safe. I think you’ll be much happier when you’ve left this lonely place. You’ve stayed here too long, and it’s made you too sad. But if you are scared about going, I can ask my dad to look after you.”

  The boy smiled, pressed a tear away. “There are countless souls in need of comfort,” he said. “History is lined with the likes of them. How would he find us amid so many?”

  “I don’t know how,” May replied, “but he would do it. He always found me in a crowded place. He never let me get lost.”

  The child jiggled his brother’s hand. “Let’s go,” he pleaded, “let’s go. Let’s go see Mama. Let’s go adventuring. I want to sail the ocean. I want to run and run.”

  But instead the boy looked around at the ruins, and Cecily wondered what he saw: the walls and doors and carpets and ceilings of a prison built five centuries ago, or the welcoming blue sky that had been there since the earth was born out of darkness. “Is it truly all right to leave?” he asked.

  “I think so.”

  “The weather seems fine. Cool, but the sun shines.”

  “A good day for travelling,” said Cecily.

  “If we go
, it will be because we want to. Not because you say we should.”

  “That’s all right. We know that.”

  “No one may tell us what to do!” remembered the bumptious child.

  “Not anymore,” agreed May.

  “We shall think on it,” said the boy: yet already the brothers had risen like smoke to their feet as if the mere thought of leaving was taking them away, leaving without further lingering as if they’d waited such a long time to be told their time had passed, and they were free. “If you see my dad,” May rushed to say, “tell him I miss him. Tell him I won’t forget him —” but they might not have heard, for they were already gone in spirit and perhaps could not hear. And although their backs were to her, May did the singular thing that Cecily would never forget: she bowed.

  Three days later, Jeremy was home. His father — more precisely, a man who did as Jeremy’s father commanded, for Humphrey Lockwood was occupied with war business at that particular junction in time — put him on the train and sent him back to Heron Hall. He was met at the village station by Hobbs, who gave him a small stone figurine which was the trophy of his dirt-stained collection.

  If anyone expected Jeremy to be ashamed of his behaviour, they were disappointed. Indeed, any criticism of the boy was silenced at the sight of him. Apart from some scuffing of his hands, his escapade hadn’t harmed him: but in his thin face and dark eyes was a new look, a fine look, a proud and peaceful look. If anyone had said anything sharp to him, the look on his face suggested he would smile and agree, because agreement would make the speaker happy; but that the speaker, smiled-upon and agreed-with in this easy way, would be left feeling narrow-minded and petty. The household came to stare at him, this boy who had run off as a naughty child and returned with the air of a prophet.

  The train journey had not tired him, for, though he seemed like somebody else now, Jeremy was still fourteen, with energy to spare. He ate supper in Peregrine’s den under the curious gaze of his family. Heloise could not take her eyes from this stranger who was her son. He would grow up to become what she hoped he’d be, a most respected and honoured man, a lawyer and, eventually, a judge; yet he did this not for her but for himself, because he returned to Heron Hall wanting to make a worthy difference to the world. In running away, he had lost the dreams of childhood and found some of the truths that make a man. He would always keep that stone figurine close to him, on a shelf where he could see it.

  When he’d left Heron Hall five days earlier, it had been in the darkest hours; by the time Cecily found his note and empty bed, Jeremy had been miles away. “You must have known I’d be worried,” said Heloise, and Jeremy replied, “Well, Mother, I left you the note saying you shouldn’t be.” And the tone of his voice, so sedate and reasonable, forced Heloise to admit that yes, he had left such a note saying just such a thing, and she really should have paid it more attention. The boy who sat before them was clearly capable of looking after himself. She’d always seen him as a flailing child, and he wasn’t like that at all.

  Throughout that first day he had walked, climbing stiles and crossing meadows, avoiding the roads. He’d known that people might be searching for him, and he hadn’t wanted to be found. He had walked and walked, but he hadn’t got far; hiking was a slow way to travel. He had slept that night in a barn —“Ha!” cried Cecily. “Did you really sleep in a barn? Just like a tinker! I told you, didn’t I, Mama?”— and after a spiny night in the straw he’d risen at pink daybreak and found a road, a passing lorry, and caught the first of several lifts which carried him, in fits and starts, south towards London. Eventually he was able to catch a train, arriving on the outskirts of the city around four o’clock, just as the day was closing in on itself. As the train wended its path underground he saw that people were using the stations as places of refuge from the bombs. Already women, children and elderly folk were readying themselves for the night, laying out their beds of tartan blankets on the dirty platforms. When he’d stepped off the train he had to pick his way carefully, not wanting to trample fingers or leave a bootprint where someone might sleep.

  He found the stairs, the pointy-finger exit signs, and came up from the underground, out into the world.

  The clean green fields and watercolour sky of the countryside were gone. This was a brown and black world, the air a dusty grey. People in hats and summer coats walked the streets as they had always done, and there was even a feeling of good cheer, as on Christmas Eve when the stores have closed and there’s nothing to do but wait for morning. Women wore high heels, men carried briefcases, bicycles and cars wove past on the road. But the grey dust touched everything, swirled in the wake of vehicles, cascaded down the shoulders of men. Where women had walked, the dust on the path preserved a trail of scratchy heel-marks. He had felt it on his teeth, that dust. It settled on his lips and tasted of all the centuries it had taken to build the city.

  Rounding a corner, Jeremy caught his breath. The road was strewn with rubble, broken bricks and shattered timbers, huge plates of plaster. A sagging row of shopfronts lined the street, each of them missing its glass. In one yawning hole which had once been a window, a chalked sign said Business As Usual. Other stores looked abandoned, their window displays raided. Looking up, he saw that the shops had been scalped of their roofs. Water poured out of a burst pipe. Debris crunched underfoot.

  He walked for as long as the light held, choosing his direction randomly. People filled the streets as the working day came to an end. They waited at bus-stops, scooted by on bikes, hurried with their colleagues to the underground. Some talked and smiled, others kept their heads down. Some stopped to consider the great blast-holes in the footpaths, the buildings torn from the rows, the piles of metal and brick that heaped chunderously over the roads. But most people did not stop, gave the destruction barely a glance. They had seen these things before, and in the morning there would be fresh things to see.

  As evening closed in, creeping coldly through the dust, the streets emptied as if they’d had the life shaken from them. He had reached a suburban road now, and the houses that stood here were undamaged, and probably there were people living unremarkably inside them: but the homes seemed to turn to Jeremy the faces of haunted houses, gutted and long unloved. Their windows were messily blacked with tape, board, fabric. Their doors were shut as if nailed to their frames. Not a dog barked, no insect thrummed, the trees didn’t shift a leaf. That untouched street, Jeremy realised later, was the scariest place he saw. Like a prisoner pegged out on a beach, it was waiting resignedly for whatever must happen.

  Darkness drifted shyly in. Taverns turned out their lights. The few people who were still on the streets paid Jeremy no mind. Everyone knew what was coming, and what must be done. Everyone assumed he was on his way to shelter somewhere safe. But he had left that place of somewhere safe, and as night sunk around him he thought of all the boys who had gone before him, the ones who endured fearsome trials on desert plains, in frail canoes, on horseback, in the heart of jungles, on the rims of volcanos; trials of pain, confusion, skill, wisdom, strength and, most of all, of courage; harrowing tests of a boy’s worthiness of becoming a warrior. Jeremy wanted to spend this night outside, as far as possible from somewhere safe. Himself against the bombs: he craved it.

  Heloise, listening to this, shook her head with a mother’s mournful pride. All around the world that night, other mothers, learning of the fatal boldness of their own sons, would do the same.

  “I walked for a long time,” Jeremy told his listeners. “I wasn’t hungry or thirsty, I wasn’t even cold. I didn’t know when the bombing would start, I didn’t know where to go. No place seemed a more likely target than another. So I just kept walking and hoped for the best.”

  “Hoped for the best!” spluttered Heloise. “Hoped to be standing where a bomb might fall!”

  Jeremy ignored her with the patience of one whose calling cannot be explained. “Finally I found a garden and sat down. I fell asleep — not completely asleep, but asleep e
nough that the silliest thoughts made sense. When I heard the siren, I thought I was back in school and the bell was ringing to call us to class. Then I remembered the bell had never sounded as urgent as that.”

  He’d opened his eyes to the oddest of sights: the sky above him was red. It was slashed across with the white beams of searchlights, and burnt black at the edges by night: but the clouds were red as if the sky had been drenched by buckets of blood.

  He didn’t see aeroplanes, but he felt the vibrations shake through his body, four hefty booms to the chest as the bombs drove themselves into the ground.

  “I started running. The sirens were howling. There was a big moon, a hunter’s moon, so I could see where I was going. I passed other people, and most of them were wearing gas masks and helmets. I didn’t have a helmet or a mask, but I didn’t care. I wasn’t frightened — not frightened at all. I felt almost . . . mad. I couldn’t wait to get to the place where the bombs had hit. I was punching my legs as I ran, trying to make them run faster. I felt sick with excitement, crazy with it — not excited to see the damage, but to be there. I felt I was running as fast as the wind, but even that wasn’t fast enough. I felt I could break bricks in my hands, that’s how furious I was. I felt like . . . a lion.”

  His eyes were glassy recalling it: Cecily stared at this changed, slightly worrying brother of hers. She glanced at Peregrine, who was watching him also. There was no astonishment on her uncle’s face; rather, he looked as if he’d just been told that all cats have claws.

  The bomb site was a mile away. He was led to it by the fires that reached for the scarlet sky, by the shrilling of ambulances and fire trucks, by the dust that billowed along the roads as a thick, repellent snow. When he reached the place, the sight was shocking. A row of seven terrace houses had been pulled down as if by a mudslide. A ravaged mountain of doors, walls, gutters and furniture spewed into the street. Chimneys were standing, as were odd walls; staircases reached for rooms that were no longer there. He wasn’t the first to arrive at the scene — there were men with hoses and first-aid kits, women with crowbars and stretchers, as well as people who had dredged themselves from the wreckage and were now digging for their entombed families and neighbours. Instructions were being shouted, whistles being blown, torch beams were clashing like sabres in the night. Something caught fire, blew a ball of flame into the sky; the rescuers answered it gruffly, neither impressed nor afraid.