The Night Language

by David Rocklin

  “Your Highness,” Lord Grant said, his face dropping as it went crimson, “I beg of you, never repeat what you’ve said beyond these four walls. I’m your solicitor and bound by duty and privilege to hold your words confidential, but you’re speaking of sedition, defiance of Parliament’s will, and possibly treason. Half of that is the will of the MPs. The other half will be that of the people. Such actions, if they’re discovered, will bring your monarchy and your family to the brink of collapse.”

  Their voices rose as their arguments collided against one another, and in the middle of it all, Alamayou and the queen found each other’s eyes. They stared at each other as if no one else was in the room, firing off volleys of sedition and execution and, from Philip, betrayal. The others there with them fell beneath the slick, smooth surface of an inky black sea, sank to the bottom and died, and it was just them.

  Alamayou heard them as he heard the wind outside, howling and formless. He went over to look at the map. From Westminster and Parliament’s houses, where it had begun the day before, he traced the path carved through the city by the Thames. Its current passed under all the bridges, Westminster on to the Waterloo, Blackfriars, Southwark, London.

  What he saw was worse than the specter city he’d first glimpsed from the Feroze. That day, the city had been like seeing the mountains at Wurq-Waha beneath a ceiling of cloud. Peaks of an impossible size, but his eye could hold it. This, this was like opening up the body and trying to find a speck of dust among all the blood, the veins, the muscles layered upon muscles upon bones, and chart that speck’s course from the head down. He saw knotted nests of lines that were each streets teeming with people, carriages, animals, homes, windows, life unspooling out against one wall and on the other side the same, and on and on, never ending until the sea.

  Every last cell of the mapped city hated him. The London he saw laid out across the table, dissected by roads and rails, would look for him. Those knots of streets and waterways and paths would tighten around him like a vise. The city would swallow him as the sea had yearned to do the night before London’s silhouette came visible from the deck of the Feroze.

  Somewhere just past the border of the map, somewhere on the air of the room, was the sea that had brought him here. It couldn’t be seen, but he knew what it could do. What it would do. That much was clear, no matter how loud everyone screamed at each other over his fate.

  The sea would take him and he wouldn’t return. The men who sailed him away, they’d come back. Philip would go somewhere safe. The queen had given her word. He tried not to give in to the voice that told him, But she gave the same word to you, gbra sadom.

  If he so chose, and if the royals would have him, Philip could return again from wherever he went.

  But I won’t. I’m the bright hot star, shooting across the sky over London and the sea, and in Abyssinia I’ll fall. Then, even the sky will forget me. The queen, the sickly prince, the princess who even now screamed at her brother and the solicitor, they’ll grow old and die and what they have of me will die with them.

  Across the room, Philip looked up to see him. He shook his head because he knew. He could see the words forming in Alamayou. They understood each other so well.

  Philip, your world will turn away from this and from me. I want it to. It does no good to put one hand in here, where things can only die, and one in the world that can still find a place for you if you look. If you try. That’s what we do. We try.

  The breeze from the open window cooled his hot face. He looked down at the scattering of dead leaves that the wind had picked up from somewhere outside and brought in to lay at their feet. When the air stirred them again they hissed across the floor, momentarily flying before falling again, too heavy to stay up for long.

  He spoke the words. It was inevitable that someone said them out loud.

  “I have to go,” he said, silencing the room.

  “You don’t.” Philip’s voice cracked.

  “We’ll send an emissary with you,” the prince insisted, his voice rising with the effort to keep up his bravado. He placed his hands on the marble of the table as if to draw its strength and its immovability into himself, to bring to bear on the hopelessness of the man standing before them. His cane rested against his chair, unused. “Lord Grant, provide some assurances of what our pardon might accomplish.”

  “It gives at least some cause for hope, Your Highness.”

  “Oh my God.” Princess Louise bowed her head.

  “Our emissary will have our pardon with him,” Lord Grant said. “The very moment your trial even starts in Abyssinia, the pardon will be presented and this nightmare will be over.”

  “Then you’ll return to us,” Prince Leopold said hopefully. “That’s exactly how this will come to a conclusion. You’ll return home and it will be as if all of this never happened.”

  “Home.”

  “Yes, Alamayou. Isn’t that right, Mother?”

  “They’ll kill him,” Philip said simply.

  “Come to us,” the queen said.

  Alamayou did.

  “From the moment they tear you from us,” she said, “I’ll fight them. I swear this to you.”

  “Your Majesty,” Lord Grant said, “you ought not promise what cannot be done—”

  “To the very last moment.”

  “I know you will,” Alamayou said, thinking, God, I’m tired.

  Alamayou wavered where he stood, but they were all so intent upon him and he didn’t want to let them know how much it hurt just to remain where they could see him, while the end of all he’d hoped for swirled just over their heads. There was a new terror blooming in every moment he stayed here with them. The hopes he had of days and years yet to come, they’d all felt so plentiful before. Now they felt hard, dry, and rare, like blooms dying inside the cracks of Abyssinian stone.

  Philip put his hands together, trying to evoke an old language even as his face fell.

  Don’t try, Alamayou wanted to tell him. Don’t look at me and see me old and gray next to you, painting a tree or a cloud while you tease me about something we’ve said to each other a thousand times over. Don’t hope for time once it’s been taken. Your hands together can’t keep either of us from being alone.

  “Fighting will destroy your family,” he told the queen. “For me, don’t. You’ve been good to me. What they say now is right. All of it happens if I don’t go. It happens to all of you. I’m just one.”

  “How can you say that?!” Philip screamed at him.

  The queen’s gaze at him was as intense as it had been that first night, when she came so close to his painting, when she held out a hand to be helped to her knees, to press herself up to it as if wanting to step inside it and be with her husband again. All through that night while they sat, exchanging the occasional word or gesture, she’d stared at his painting. He hadn’t been sure if she’d even seen it, truly, or whether something in her moved away from the painting, the room, Windsor itself, back to a different day. She may have been staring at the past, but she came back that night.

  This gaze at him was different, he thought. A long, last look.

  The others fell silent. They bowed their heads, careful not to stare at their queen as she wept for Alamayou.

  “Please,” the queen said quietly, “don’t speak to me as if I’m doing a noble thing. I cannot be the reason you go back.”

  “You aren’t,” Princess Louise assured her. “It’s them—”

  “Everything that befell your mother befell you, too,” the queen said. “Everything that you did, you were compelled to do.” She glared at the Lord Grant. “Including love,” she said. “If anything shall be written about our discussions today, you’ll be sure to include that.”

  “I will, your Majesty.”

  “Your Majesty,” Alamayou smiled. “Don’t. You gave me so much.”

  “You a
ct as if we’re simply sending you home. This was my idea. I made you do this. I told you, ‘say it all,’ and I will have to live with that. And I cannot.”

  Alamayou raised his scarred hand to wipe the tear from her cheek. Every day pain ran through the hand, though he’d stopped thinking of it. The pain at the stretching of his fingers, reaching for painlessness, had long ago submerged, out of his thoughts.

  These were his friends, he thought. They wept for him. Only Philip turned away, his entire body shuddering.

  “When your Albert died,” Alamayou said, “you were there. Not inside the room, but there. Near.”

  She fumbled with her teacup. The princess brought a napkin to dab at the silver tray it rested upon.

  “Clumsy,” the queen said quietly. “It’s what remembering does. We lock these things away, you see, but it can be so unexpected, what comes of looking back.”

  “But you knew when it was done,” Alamayou said.

  “Yes.”

  “You didn’t wonder.”

  “No. We knew.”

  “That’s the hardest. That you love but don’t see. That you won’t know what happens. That’s the part I’m afraid of, Philip.”

  “I can’t,” Philip whispered hoarsely. “I can’t.”

  He ran from the room.

  Outside the window, a child danced a solitary jig from stone to stone in the garden. She wore white. Twirling atop each footfall, arms spread open, she held her balance and defied the stones to make her fall.

  The queen, her children, and Alamayou, all of them watched the girl dance the day alive.

  §

  “There’s no hope for you if you go back,” Philip said in the apartment late that afternoon. “You understand that, don’t you?”

  Despite the dusk hour, the day was still impossibly bright. The light took on a threadbare, dusted appearance.

  Alamayou sat at the apartment window, painting. In faint colors he’d recreated the portrait room. A hazy fire burned in its hearth, and the outlines of two framed images hung on its wall. In the corner, all but off the canvas, was the arm of a chair, and the hint of a woman’s black sleeve resting on it.

  Outside the portrait room window, he brushed in long shadows over the lawn to the garden and the paving stones. The dancing girl was gone.

  “I’ll tell my story,” Alamayou told Philip as he finished. “Maybe they’ll hear. They don’t know me. Most Abyssinians never saw me. Those who did, I’m different now. I could be not known. There’s a chance.”

  “You’re wrong. They’ll send you diplomatically. Do you understand? A ship with orders to deliver you. They’ll likely jail you for the whole damned voyage, to ferry you back to Abyssinia and hand you over. Your own people will take you. There’ll be a trial, if you’re lucky. And then what? Gallows? A gun to your head? And a piece of paper from the same queen who bloody invaded them is supposed to do something?”

  “Or maybe I can jump from the ship when we see land. Swim away where they don’t know me. I’ll be careful at the rail—”

  “Stop it! Stop making a bloody joke out of this!”

  They gazed out at the world outside their window. It seemed as the dead do in paintings, Alamayou thought. Wise and eternal.

  “This is no different than standing at the fire,” Philip told him. “You’re killing yourself, Alamayou.”

  He moved Alamayou’s canvas aside and knelt before him.

  “We can run,” Philip said. “Let’s go. Now.”

  “No. The man, Grant and the prince, they said we would be hunted. They would be hunted. The queen, all of them. You. Especially you. If I don’t go, what happens to you? Who do they hurt instead? If not me, the one like me, who helped me. No, Philip. No.”

  “Listen to me. We can be exactly like what you wished for in Meqdala. We’ll run and we’ll lose everything of ourselves. Our names and our lives. I know how to survive on the streets. I’ve done it. We can leave right now. You only have until dawn before they come for you.”

  “We’ll never have peace. We’ll never have home.”

  “What do I do then?” Philip screamed at him. “Tell me! What would you have me do?”

  Outside, the sounds of Windsor at evening rose. The chimes of the stable, the buckles and water buckets, the footfalls across the darkening walks that led to its every corner.

  “Close your eyes,” Alamayou said, “and listen.”

  Philip closed his eyes. In that moment, it became clear. The world in motion was cold and vast and indestructible. It opened in dizzying ways, to release plague, to swallow the dead offered up in war. But, too, it opened to take in strangers and care for them.

  The world opened there in the apartment, if nowhere else, to make room for them to breathe. It shimmered so brightly that the only way to see it bathing them as their words fell was to close their eyes and let their language be silence.

  “Be a doctor,” Alamayou said. “Help people like you helped the prince. Live. If I come back, live with me. If I don’t, live for me. That’s what you can do. If you say you will, I’ll be ready to leave when morning comes.”

  Walking away from Alamayou, Philip went to the bed. Beneath it was the medical bag the princess had given him as a token of appreciation. He opened it, touching each item inside reverentially as his mind raced and all the years of his life buckled under the weight of the months at Windsor. Under the simple grace of knowing Alamayou.

  His tears fell in to be absorbed by the balled tufts of cotton. They were so like clouds, he thought as the cotton swelled.

  “You can do this, Philip. So strong. Strong enough to hold me through it all. You have to be. I’m scared to go. To die.”

  “I think I understand now,” Philip said, “what needs to be done, and who needs to do it.”

  He reached inside the bag and rummaged through its many pill vials, ointments, sutures, and clean linen until he found what he was looking for.

  Chapter Nineteen

  3 January 1901

  We could run.

  Lying on his cot, Alamayou watched the sun set through the bars of his cell’s window as Philip’s words lingered in the air. In thirty years there hadn’t been a day when he didn’t reach back into the dead past for a moment of it, some action taken or words spoken, and turn it over in his hands until hours had suddenly disappeared and the world had gone on to the next day without him. That last day in the apartment at Windsor more than any other moment of his life. More than the fire, the rail, the war.

  And of that day, those words. We could run.

  Listening to the twilight noises of Newgate prison, he gave in yet again to the need to hold those words. Yes, we could have run. We could have lost ourselves in London or crossed over into a new country and begun to build a life. We could have found a flat in a city somewhere. Each day we’d listen for news that the queen and her family had toppled because of us. Every night, when we watched the sun go down and the city around us come into its dark life, our hearts would start pounding and our mouths would go dry and silent for fear that that night would be our last before we were found.

  Or we could have found a cottage somewhere in a green valley, on the outskirts of a village far away from everything and everyone. At night, we’d tell each other that we felt safe. We would never imagine the way that cottage would look if it burned to the ground with us inside.

  Anywhere we could have run to, we would be two black men, together, and for that we’d be hunted. Every day, every night.

  But if we’d run, we might have had one more of those days and nights. Or two. Maybe that would have been worth everything.

  “Get up,” a voice ordered him from outside the cell. “There’s a carriage waiting for you.”

  The guard unlocked his cell door, then stepped aside to let Rabbi Ariel pass.

  Alamayou took the items the rabb
i offered him with a puzzled expression. A straight razor, a towel, and fresh clothes.

  “Hurry,” Rabbi Ariel said. “I don’t know how much time we have.”

  Washing and dressing as fast as he could, Alamayou gathered his few possessions and followed Rabbi Ariel and two more guards through the maze of cell-lined corridors to Newgate’s entrance.

  Princess Louise waited there in her landau. Spotting him, she opened the carriage door.

  “Is she all right?” Alamayou asked.

  “She lives,” Princess Louise said. “Alamayou, she wants to see you.”

  §

  Alamayou got out of the landau and followed the princess. The rabbi kept at a safe distance, his mouth gaping at the spectacle of Windsor.

  As they passed through the shadow of the Round Tower, Alamayou glanced up at its parapets. He turned toward the ward where their apartment had been, and found the window they’d stood together at so many times to gaze out at the world they’d become a part of.

  Such a strange thing, he thought. None of them were unique moments. People stood at their window and watched the world every day. And yet, who had moments like ours, anywhere?

  A few steps ahead, the princess paused. They were close to the Upper Ward. “It’s for you to find the way from here,” she told him. “She wants you to come to her in the room where you first saw her.”

  “Another test,” Rabbi Ariel grumbled.

  “I trust your service won’t mind the sight of someone like me wandering the halls,” Alamayou said.

  “And will you be wandering?” the princess asked him.

  “Only for the moments it takes to walk to the portrait room, Your Highness.”

  “They’ve been told that we’ll be hosting a guest,” Princess Louise said. “I’ll be right behind you, as will your rabbi. Rabbi Ariel, of course, you’re welcome to come in.”

  “I should hope so,” the rabbi said, trying to hide his excitement. “Too cold out here for an old man.”

  Alamayou led the way into the castle. He marveled at how it all came flooding back to him. There were new interiors, fresh paint, and decorations of a different era. As he took in each room, the surfaces sloughed away like dead skin, revealing to him the sights he once saw on a daily basis. They passed a ballroom and he winced at the bulk of the table, at the many chairs lining either side like the legs of a millipede, because at the far end he saw himself so much younger, sitting and not understanding as Naismith and the royals exchanged the first words that had led him to everything that came after.