The Night Language

by David Rocklin

  The young man gestured with his cane, and at his command the butler came with other servants in tow. Hands grabbed Philip roughly. Two servants, little more than hooligans under their oiled hair and perfectly centered cravats, pulled Alamayou away.

  Alamayou’s eyes pleaded with Philip for a reason.

  “Leave him alone!” Philip said before being dragged away to Windsor’s gates, where the servants put him out.

  A low rumble like distant thunder rose from the castle grounds. From behind the gate’s bars, Philip saw the audience stand at attention as soldiers wheeled a heavily laden wagon down the center of the lawn.

  §

  The servants brought Alamayou to another room. Paintings of men hung on the walls. Somehow, he knew they were long dead.

  In the center of the room, there was a large bed atop a box platform, covered in a blanket that puffed as if filled with clouds. There was a bowl of strange and colorful fruit on a side table next to a pitcher of water, and a window easily as large as the door the servants had closed and locked.

  He heard their voices outside. Minutes passed, and still he heard them.

  They’d imprisoned him. The room was no better than ansara. A cell.

  Outside the window, he saw how the English had mastered the land. Carpets of flowers grew in carefully cut rectangles and no farther. The lush green grass came to the walls of the castle and stopped in a perfect line. The trees were bagged and trimmed into shapes as spherical as the fruit in the bowl. Everything that lived wild in Abyssinia obeyed the English in this Windsor.

  Memories came. The tame grass outside the apartment window became the wild blades that grew all across the plateau at Debre Tabor, beneath the tents of his father’s army, the fires and families that dotted the visible earth as far as he could see. He closed his eyes and was among them, watching the soldiers wrestle and duel each other on horseback with spears and shields, playing at the violence that would kill them one day. The winds peeled away from the black shale cliffs encircling the amba and the plateau to fill the tents and set their loose flaps dancing.

  He remembered his mother dancing in her own tent to the pounding pulse of the negerit and not once looking up to see him watching her.

  The sound of wheels outside the room’s windows brought him back. Far from the castle, men pushed a massive wagon. They rolled off the cannon chained to its flat back and slowly turned its muzzle around to aim at the immense wooden structure he’d seen earlier, an enormous model of his father’s Meqdala fortress, surrounded by potted trees and figures of straw, dressed in shammas like his.

  The stem of the cannon ignited. A flame burst out of its muzzle and the false Meqdala exploded into fists of jagged debris. Pillars of ash and cloud, black as jet, swelled into the air above the heads of the audience.

  The twists of smoke called the English close to wander among the debris, picking at it and laughing at the way it burned. Cheers and gunshots rang out in celebration of what the English could do.

  He couldn’t watch Abyssinia torn into any more pieces, and he turned away. At the farthest possible point away from where the English Meqdala lay in ruins, he saw the elegant gates of the castle entrance he’d come through with Philip. A dark figure walked away from the bars of the gate, having turned away as well from the hat-tossing crowd.

  Alamayou threw open the window and screamed. His voice was immediately lost in the fading thunder of the cannon. “Philip! Layard!”

  He didn’t know if Philip could see him from so far away. Still, he raised his hands and clasped them together. He wasn’t sure of the words, whether they were right, but his world had been reduced to one room, the rest to dust, and before when Philip had allowed their hands to join on the Feroze deck, the words felt like they fit.

  “Layard not a-lone!”

  The figure paused, then continued onto the long road away from Windsor.

  Chapter Three

  The coachman who’d brought them past the hot-air balloon to Windsor pulled up alongside Philip on the Long Walk. Up close, Philip found him a diminutive sort in a coarse black tweed and ascot. There was a cumbersome iron frame around his left leg, down to his thick-soled boot, that Philip hadn’t noticed before.

  “I’ll get ye home,” he told Philip. “Where d’ye hail from?”

  “Lambeth as a boy, but pray don’t bother. It’s no home for me anywheres.”

  “Yer people then?”

  “Dead and gone to the last.”

  “Got t’ stay somewhere,” the coachman said. “I can see t’ye t’night. Won’t be much as I’m bare, but ye’ll make out tolerably well.”

  Philip climbed aboard the coachman’s trap and they headed northwest. For an hour, the only sound he heard from the man was the moist suckling of the tobacco sprig he kept firmly tucked in his mouth. But the coachman hummed an old melody, and Philip thought it an agreeable way to watch the scenery pass. At least it allowed him to avoid the worry curling in his gut.

  They arrived in Hertfordshire at the base of the Chilterns. The coachman’s modest cottage was nestled in a cleft in the land between a stream of mountain runoff and a windmill that looked to be from Elizabeth’s age.

  “Ye can call me by my given name, Charles,” the coachman said. “Ye may be kaffir but yer a child of God, leastwise I see it thus. Din’t used to think such things, but ye come to loss, ye learn patience.”

  A woman emerged from the cottage with a dishcloth in her hands. She was large in comparison to Charles. Weak flaxen curls framed her ample, rosy face. She did a poor job concealing her shock.

  “One night,” she said, refusing to make eye contact with Philip. “He can sleep in the stable.”

  That evening she brought Philip a peasant’s supper of bread, cheese, and tea to the stable after sorting a makeshift bed from straw and an old sheet. Charles came to see him after and told him that he’d inquire of servants about work elsewhere. He brought a lantern and an old, leather-bound book.

  “D’ ye read or write?” he asked Philip.

  “I do.”

  “Learn at school, then?”

  “No. From a man who took me in after my father passed. A doctor, White. He taught me.”

  “Take it. It’s th’ holy book, an’ some writings I made. Thoughts an’ such. What I come t’ know. But I’m old an’ don’ seem t’ need it now. Got no thoughts worth remembering. It’ll see ye through th’ night.”

  Outside the stable, Philip heard the sounds of chopping, the ignition of fire, of empty buckets chiming their way to water and the gleaming note of the bottle-jack in the flames.

  Whatever she may think of me, he mused, she thinks enough of Charles to make a home with him.

  “Ye been at war?”

  “Abyssinia,” Philip said. “With the Second. It’s a year I’ve been gone and no home, nowhere to go. I may as well have died there.”

  “I was at war. The Lower Canada Rebellion. Came home in body only, and not all a’me.” He patted his leg brace. “Took me years. Lost m’family. A good woman, that, but not m’first nor m’wife. She abides me, is all. At night sometimes, I wake and I’m beating ’er. I don’t know who she is, even. But I’m here. I’m breathin’. Plenty who ain’t. This is it, all I know. Ye born, ye die. Between th’ days, ye find someone t’ abide ye. Maybe, remember ye.”

  He walked to the stable entrance. “I’ll go in th’ morning. Ask around for ye. Maybe there’s work.”

  “I’m grateful to you.”

  After Charles left him, Philip sat in the open entry, watching Charles’s woman work through the cottage window and thinking of where to start.

  He sat awake thinking about what to do when morning came. He’d need work of some sort or he’d end up in an almshouse. He was knackered, but he didn’t want to sleep because he’d dream of the war, and the plague that took his old life in Lambeth, his father an
d his neighbors, and left him homeless until Marcus Baker White. He didn’t like nights because his thoughts didn’t even sound like his own, but instead like violence in him that he never asked for. Violence, and thoughts he wished he could rid himself of.

  Let me just once wake up and be in someone else’s body. Someone bound for a good, normal life.

  Charles seemed a decent sort. Gave him a ride, a Bible, and some time, all for a Negro he didn’t know from Adam. That took a good sort. Still, he was glad the coachman left him alone when he did. Their conversation had taken a turn toward the quiet things, the silences men carried in their hearts. The wars. The returns. The troubles. He’d even spoken some of his own out loud, which wasn’t like him at all.

  Sitting in the barn, he regretted saying anything. Words only led people to try and climb inside him and have a look around. Why did you go to war? Why did you go to jail? What sort of man are you?

  Once they came inside, once they saw for themselves, they left. They ran.

  It was strange, the thing he found himself wondering about there in the coachman’s barn. There was plenty to keep him awake. Finding work, eating, finding a place to stay. But instead, he wondered what the next day would bring for Alamayou.

  He barely knew the Abyssinian, but felt—knew, somehow—that it was the same for him. He wished it were different for them, but it was worthless for someone like him to pine for what he couldn’t have. Love, or home.

  He supposed he’d set out in the morning, but as he closed his eyes, he couldn’t see what the use was.

  Late that night, heavy steps came through the stable entrance. Charles lit a lantern and brought it close to Philip, startling him awake.

  “Ye been summoned back to th’ castle,” Charles told him. “The African needs t’be questioned.”

  §

  At the rounded end of the Long Walk, Charles brought his trap to a halt. Philip climbed out and was immediately met by the butler, who led him through the guests’ entrance into the Upper Ward, to the first floor. The bleed of some hollow sound came intermittently through the plasterwork and the wood. Voices.

  On the other side of an ornate room—an immense reception hall with lavish Rococo ceilings and Gobelins tapestries—there was a knot of men and women standing in the open doorway of an apartment. Some were servants by their dress. The men were jacketed in the custom of valets, the women in lace aprons with tied sheafs around their hair. Many of them stared uncomfortably at the floor.

  There were proper ladies as well, and at least one gentleman Philip spotted between the bodies. The noise by then was assaultive.

  “This is the other one,” the butler said, parting the crowd. “Philip Layard.”

  Philip made his way to the front, where he saw Alamayou inside the apartment, standing at the far end of the room near a great window that looked out onto Windsor’s grounds. He still wore his shamma from the day before and looked as if he hadn’t slept.

  “It’s me.” Philip took a tentative step inside the apartment. “You know me.”

  “Philip.”

  “Yes, Alamayou. Yes.”

  “It is as I told you yesterday on the field,” someone said. “There are eyes upon him.”

  The young man they’d seen in the royal box now stood in the apartment doorway. He made use of a silver-headed cane. “What shall we do for such as the Abyssinian?” he asked wearily.

  The butler brought a chair to the doorway. “Please, Highness. You exert yourself.”

  “I’m fine enough, Simon.”

  He sat with the cane resting across his lap. “I see wisdom dawning in your eyes, Mr. Layard. Let me make introductions. I am Prince Leopold, Her Majesty’s eighth child. Now you know to whom you spoke yesterday. Of all the white men you could have chosen to insult, you chose me. Let’s be done with it for the moment, as there are larger issues to attend to. Nothing need be said to me until I wish it said. Much, I suggest, needs to be said to the Abyssinian. Mr. Naismith, would you be so kind as to explain the state of play to Mr. Layard?”

  “Yes, of course, Highness.”

  The man who had introduced himself as the ambassador to Abyssinia came to the door of the apartment. He was attired in fine grey trousers and waistcoat, yet he spoke with a quieted Cockney intonation that years of study hadn’t erased completely.

  “You,” Naismith said curtly. “Layard. Can you communicate with him?”

  “Crudely,” Philip said. “We use our hands, is all. That and the stray word.”

  “Do you know the word for mother?” Naismith asked.

  “A queer sort of question.”

  “One I suggest you answer,” Prince Leopold said. His voice no longer belonged to a young man but to a royal used to being obeyed without question.

  “I don’t know that word,” Philip said.

  “There are discrepancies in Alamayou’s account,” the prince said.

  “Alamayou hasn’t accounted for anything,” Philip said. “It’s everyone else supposing what happened, Your Highness.”

  “Yourself included.”

  “Yes.”

  “And we’ll of course look into your account,” the ambassador said. “As we will the accounts of the soldiers and those Abyssinians our governor there will find, to get down to the truth of him.”

  “What sort of discrepancies?” Philip asked as the familiar doubt began to creep in.

  “For now,” Naismith told the prince, “we can perhaps attribute it to the confusion of war, the loss of his mother, and his father’s consummate evil. There’s much to learn about him, and the queen Tirroo Wirk. How she died. What he saw. What he did.”

  Alamayou came at the sound of his mother’s name. He took a few steps away from the cool air at the window, but no farther. There was something in the eyes of the one who’d said his country’s name the day before, and fire, that made him hesitate. The man’s eyes were on him in the way that the eyes of the tribal chiefs, the kagezmachs, were when he sat alongside his father. As if being alive with his father’s blood in his veins was reason enough to hate him.

  “Are you accusing him of something?” Philip motioned for Alamayou to go back to the window.

  Alamayou did. He saw worry on Philip’s face, and something else. A rising anger. “Philip.” He clasped his hands together.

  The sight calmed Philip. “Yes, Alamayou.” He clasped his own.

  “It seems you communicate at least in a rudimentary way,” Naismith said. “Meaning simple.”

  “I know what it means,” Philip snapped. “He lost everything in the war. Your Highness, you can’t believe he’d do something to his mother.”

  “I don’t believe anyone is suggesting anything of the sort,” the prince said. “Are they, Ambassador?”

  “We should be clear, the provisional Abyssinian government is keen to learn how its queen died. If by Tewedros’ hand, the matter is at an end.”

  “She was all that was left to him,” Philip said.

  “With Your Highness’s permission,” Naismith said, “matters must be stated clearly.”

  “See to it.”

  “Let me be blunt, then,” Naismith said. “He is the son and heir to a tyrant, one hated even more in his own country than here. They would like nothing better than to see him punished for his father’s crimes, and how do you think it will be if we learn the queen didn’t have to die?”

  “What’s he to do with it?” Philip’s anger rose. “Your own soldiers said what happened. I’m surprised you’d have trouble believing them.”

  “Careful, boy,” Naismith said.

  “So it’s true, we all have a bit of savage in us,” Prince Leopold said. “Let us all reason with one another now, shall we? Mr. Layard, it’s to the ambassador to conduct a thorough investigation into the circumstances of this queen. He will overlook no possibility, isn’t tha
t so?”

  “It is, Your Highness.”

  “I speak not of hostility now, but duty. Do you see the distinction, Mr. Layard?”

  “I do, Your Highness.”

  “And for you, you must reach the Abyssinian by any means necessary. He must be made to understand. He needs to speak to this. If he knows nothing and his account is found to be credible, so be it.”

  The prince rose with assistance. “Yesterday was nothing but pageantry and pomp, Mr. Layard. The words he was to say for all of our edification? A ridiculous notion dreamt up by Her Majesty’s secretary as a tribute to English benevolence or some such drivel. As if by virtue of standing on our lawn he would magically transform into a man with no fear and no feelings about what had befallen him, oh, and he could speak our language to boot. Idiotic. But now we stand under a very different sky, let me assure you. This matter of his mother worries me greatly. We have under our roof the son of the tyrant we just went to war with. It doesn’t go over well with certain of our political opponents. It may surprise you to learn that our monarchy isn’t universally loved. And so, it comes down to a simple task. He needs to learn words. The right words.”

  Tottering on his cane, he left. Soon the service disbanded as well, and Alamayou and Philip were alone in the apartment.

  For the first time since their arrival, they truly beheld each other. Their broad noses and full lips that turned down, the hooded eyes, almost Oriental in their gently crescented rims. Their hair was unkempt and wiry. Closely cropped by their own hands at sea, their crude efforts at grooming had left their heads choppy and uneven as a landscape of irregular hills.

  “Damfino,” Philip sighed. “What the hell am I to do? What the bloody hell happened at the fire? He’s asking about your mother, Alamayou, as if something was done to her.”

  Alamayou got up on the bed. He took up a thin throw pillow and set it across his lap, much the way the prince held his cane.

  “Prince Leopold. Prince, like you. He’s important. He could send us both away or worse.”