Coronets and Steel

by Sherwood Smith

  “That would be nice.” At least that didn’t sound like I was begging for handouts, so I nodded like a dashboard doll. “Thanks.”

  “Gaspard will call for you at a quarter to eight, then. I hold tomorrow evening a treasured promise.”

  She had led us to the maze garden, which bordered the long curved sweep of a drive from the huge gate to somewhere on the other side of the palace. Directly in front of the palace waited a new Volvo with flags mounted on the front bumper. Seeing us, a chauffeur emerged from the car and opened the back door, where he stood at attention.

  Aunt Sisi pressed my hands between hers. “Au revoir, my dear. Remember the address if you change your mind.”

  “Thank you.” I turned away and marched briskly to the gate. The guard there gave me a salute. I gave him a rather strained smile in return.

  When I got back to the inn I was met by a sharp change in atmosphere. Though the charming downstairs restaurant had always been tidy, it was even more clean than it had been for the wedding. Madam bustled out, calling urgently for Theresa, and this time she curtseyed before asking what my pleasure would be for dinner tonight? No mention of dining with the family. I stared down into her solemn face and slowly began to realize what Aunt Sisi’s words had meant.

  The local police had come here and asked about me. They—and the Waleskas—assumed I was Ruli, using a false name. Aunt Sisi had rushed to meet me . . . and now she was the only person who knew I wasn’t her daughter.

  I was about to straighten Madam out, but my reluctance to go into my background, my purpose for being here, made me hesitate.

  If it didn’t harm Ruli to have a double prancing around the Adriatic, it won’t hurt her here, I decided. I’d let Aunt Sisi do the talking, when and if she wanted. Until that time, easiest to leave things as they were.

  I turned to Madam, who had not asked why I suddenly understood their language. The giddiness had abated, but my emotions still roiled.

  The Waleskas’ faces showed concern, so I forced a smile and said to Theresa, “Anything’s fine for dinner. There are two things I would like to do . . .”

  I hesitated. I had been about to ask if they knew the hours to the business side of the cathedral, which had to be where they kept records, but everything Aunt Sisi had told me froze me up. I’d lost my anonymity. Was that a bad thing or a good thing? Bad in that everyone who might recognize me would want to know what I was doing, but good because if they thought I was Ruli I’d be wafted past red tape, but then there’d be even more questions . . .

  So ask Aunt Sisi, right?

  And I skipped to my second thing. “I would like to hire a vehicle to take me up into the mountains tomorrow, for a day trip.”

  Madam spread her hands as if to say “Anything—anything!” And since all friendly intercourse seemed to have been frozen by the awesome intrusion of Rank, I decamped to my room.

  By morning, when I woke up to the roar of thunder announcing a major storm, I knew there’d be no trip to find Mina Hajyos.

  But I was not upset. I wanted to spend time on the language—try to figure out what was going on in my brain. I could track down Mina the governess the day after Aunt Sisi’s party.

  It was early, so I did a set of ballet exercises, even using the empty hallway for some combinations, leaps, and turns. It felt great, except that I wished I could get in some fencing. My arms needed the work, or I’d lose my speed and flexibility. I settled for a double set of push-ups.

  I was going to head downstairs to breakfast when Theresa came to my door in her old-fashioned school uniform. Surprised, I forestalled her shy questions by asking, “Do you have school in summer?”

  “Yes, we have festival in spring, and mid-August to early September. It is winter when we take our long break. The snow is sometimes too heavy for many students to come.” Then back to business, “Mama wishes me to say that the rain might prevent a journey into the mountains, unless it is urgent.”

  I said, “It can wait a day. Meanwhile, I have a question, but it can also wait, if you’ve got to get to school.”

  “It is early. I helped mother get the bread in an hour ago.” Her serious mouth lifted at the corners. “Please ask.”

  “It’s about Fyadar. I saw a mural in the royal palace. Is he a Dobreni figure? I—I know a few of the stories, and I have loved them all my life. I’d love to find out more. Fyadar, and his friend Xanpia. She’s either an angel or a witch, I guess, since she’s got some kind of power. Fyadar seems to be a boy in some stories, and in some he’s half-animal.”

  “You know about Fyadar?” Her expressive was odd, interested yet wary. Then she smiled. “Fyadar is a figure of legend.” She spoke formally, with the practice of presenting a report before a class. “The stories about him and his friends are ancient . . .” She went on to describe how the teachers during the Soviet years explained that he was borrowed from the Greek Pan, because he was half-goat. Fyadar, with his band of other magical mountain-forest denizens such as a good werewolf and a young vampire—

  “Vampire?” I yelped, almost adding, Gran never mentioned any vampires!

  Theresa flushed. “Yes,” she said in a low but firm voice. “It is true that they are cursed. As some say are the were-creatures. But many children, ah, it is not their fault, and Saint Xanpia is friend to all.” Her voice hitched on a gasp. Her face flooded crimson, and she added, “So it says in the legends. Fyadar and friends, they roam the mountains.”

  “I wonder if the legends are the same ones I heard. Have they changed in the last few years?”

  You know how people will give you an answer, but not to the question you asked? “The legends are old. Fyadar and his friends were allied with the animals and birds.”

  “Except for evil ones, like wolf packs,” I said, hoping to get her past the obvious details to whatever made her hesitate, as if thinking out each sentence, innocuous as they sounded. “And evil fey.” Since we were speaking French, I used the word fée. Her eyelids flickered, as if the word had extra meaning. Different meaning. As if it was a cue, or a code. “I never heard anything about weres. Or vampires.”

  She stood there, looking at the floor.

  Somewhat exasperated, I went on, “In the stories I was told, Fyadar and his friends often appeared and helped lost children, starving children, mistreated children. I got the feeling that the Fyadar legends were myths centered around the mystery, and well, what with bears and wolves, the savagery of mountain life.”

  “The Soviet instructors called them escapism for children,” Theresa said, still in that school recitation voice. “All religion, and stories about—about the mountains—were forbidden. The older generation, during the war, could only study German things. “

  “But your parents and grandparents told them anyway?” I prompted. Because how else would she know them?

  She gave me a quick, fleeting smile, before her dark gaze earnestly read my face again. “The adults, when young. In school. They . . . they had their own resistance. They wrote stories.” When I didn’t throw up my hands and run away in horror, she offered with less timidity, “My sister’s generation. And older. Inherited them. And wrote more.”

  “They resisted by writing stories?” I repeated and laughed. “That is awesome!” The word came out in English. I hastened to clarify, to win an answering grin from her, all over her face.

  As if a cork had been pulled from a bottle, Theresa explained in a stream of enthusiasm, her thin hands gesturing.

  The secrets began with the hiding of the Jews when the Germans invaded. They vanished—in plain sight. It was a countrywide conspiracy. Later, under the Soviets, the suppression of all religion caused a similar urge to secret resistance.

  The children included the secret hidings in their stories, to the extent of publishing them, usually by what used to be called jellygraph. This labor-intensive method of publication involved writing in copy-ink on a tray of gelatin, and pressing papers on the ink until the ink slowly sank to the bottom of
the tray. Then you had to write it all out again.

  “Anna joined a Fyadar secret society when she was ten.” Theresa laughed. She was sitting on my chair, her feet together and her back straight. “They had signals, and passwords, and the little books were passed from hand to hand. Many had been recopied. I have collected some of these,” she added self-deprecatingly. “They are rare and fragile.”

  “May I see some?” I asked.

  Her cheeks pinked. “I will show you, but they are not, well, literature. Some are badly spelled as well, and have crude drawings not proper. Of the Gestapo, when they came to oversee the German soldiers, and of the Soviets. But,” she tipped her head, “Sister Magdalene once told me Fyadar societies did more for making children remember their heritage than the combined efforts of the overlords.”

  “So the local Jewish children were part of this?”

  “Yes.” She smiled. “The Gestapo could not take away people who were not there. They dressed like us, and learned and worshipped in secret, and our parents and grandparents saw nothing, heard nothing. They had their own schools, in secret. But the children met to trade books, at certain places.”

  “Wow. How could that happen? I mean, the rest of Europe sure wasn’t as enlightened. I wish they had been.”

  Theresa gave me a troubled glance. “I know. But here, early, we had to learn to live with one another, because . . .” She turned her gaze toward the window, and the wariness was back. “Because peace is good,” she finished firmly, in that tone people use when they’re trying to cover over for something they’d meant to say. “The people told the Germans that the Jews were sent out of the country two hundred years ago. There are no Jews anymore, that’s what they told the Germans, and the Soviets.”

  “And it worked?”

  “Dobrenica is small,” she said, hands out.

  “So tell me about the secret societies. You belonged to one?”

  “By the time I was old enough to join, the societies were already small. The Soviets were gone, and it did not matter so much to be secret anymore. I loved to read the stories, and I began to collect them.” She ducked her head and buried her hands in her skirt.

  I said gently, guessing, “And you wrote a few, perhaps?”

  She blushed, and there was the fleeting grin again.

  “I’d love to see those.”

  “They are written in Dobreni.” She was barely audible. “And are not very good. I was young when I wrote them. Now I am too busy with studies.”

  “I would enjoy seeing them, if you would enjoy sharing them. That’s the story I grew up loving. And as for not very good Dobreni, I’m trying hard to learn, and the best way to learn is by practice.”

  So that’s how I spent the day.

  As soon as I began to read, the rhythms of sentences were so familiar I began to suspect that during those early years, when Gran had babysat me while Mom and Dad worked, she’d told me those stories in Dobreni. That had to be why the language surfaced in my mind like a reverse of the sinking of Atlantis—no sign of it at first, then suddenly it’s all there, though in simple form.

  Once I figured out the orthography and the spelling, reading was easy. Some of the stories were handwritten and drawn in battered old composition books, others blurrily reproduced by jellygraph. Most were what we’d today call graphic novels—drawings connected by dialogue. In the sixties someone must have discovered comics, because the dialogue began to appear in balloons like the comics I grew up with, as opposed to the early books with the dialogue written in tiny letters beside each drawing.

  As had happened at the palace, the language became easier to read—partly because the vocabulary was simple. Kids wrote for each other, so there wasn’t much attempt at sophisticated structure or poetic flights.

  By lunchtime I’d worked through most of the books. The stories gave me a strong sense of spirit, a determination by independent-minded people striving to maintain independence. In the earlier books (two dated 1940 and 1942), the violent drawings and the gruesome ends to the conquerors expressed rage. On some pages, grade-school-scurrilous additions had been cramped into the margins by hands other than the original writer or copier, much of it fading. I wondered if school ink was thinned to make it last.

  After I’d read through the stack, I sat cross-legged on my bed as rain washed down the windows. I had this weird sense that these little books were a gateway to some mystery. Maybe it was the way Theresa had been wary, had picked her words so carefully for no reason I could discern. But there was also that powerful, vivid experience of staring at the mural in the palace, the forest and mountains filled with detail that was almost Mannerist in form. One thing I knew about the Mannerists: every symbol was important, freighted with meaning.

  I began to read more slowly, looking up every word I did not know. The storylines were pretty much the same thing over and over—Fyadar and his friends, or sometimes a friend had a solo adventure, fighting the invaders and defeating them. I began looking at the details, comparing Gran’s stories to these.

  Most of the details matched my memory, except for the mysterious Xanpia, who was sometimes called Shanzana, especially when she appeared on certain mountains. She was occasionally called an angel in a few stories—I couldn’t tell if those were older or newer ones. My grandmother had never described what she looked like, so I’d pictured her like Tinkerbell in the Disney version of Peter Pan.

  As I thought back, I had a persistent image of it being a question about Xanpia that had resulted in an end to the stories: after that, Gran said I was a big girl, and she would read aloud to me from real books—George Macdonald and Andrew Lang and in French, La Fontaine Con-tes. They were all fiction, unrelated to real life. Responsible people never mixed fiction with real life.

  Two things hit me on that second read. One, brief references to Saint Xanpia’s Blessing. It was so buried among mostly Roman Catholic talk (which you’d expect among mostly Roman Catholic people) and terse references to the different mountains that I nearly went past it. This Blessing was teamed up with the word Vrajhus, which was not defined in the dictionary. From the context, it seemed to translate as magic—except that they also used the word Magus.

  Not for the first time I longed for access to the Internet. But there was no computer in the house. From what I could see, electricity of any kind was a relatively new thing—like hot and cold running water, from how the fixtures seemed to be jerry-rigged in the bathrooms, not matching the enormous, ancient porcelain tub on feet that probably had been filled by buckets lugged up from the kitchen until relatively recently.

  I prowled around the room once, struggling against a strong wish to ask Alec. I wished he was there, but I didn’t wish he was there. I wished he would show up after I’d proved him wrong about Gran, and everything would be . . . would be . . . would be what?

  I flopped onto the bed and picked up the next book.

  By late afternoon the difficult Germanic handwritings began to look like wmwmwmwmwm. I kept at it, hoping to crack the mystery, until I heard running feet on the stairs.

  Theresa knocked, and on my shouting “Entre!” she burst in, face red and sweat beading her hairline.

  “Did you read them?” she asked.

  “Wonderful!” I enthused. She beamed with delight, so I said, “But what’s Saint Xanpia’s Blessing?”

  Her smile vanished. Both hands flew to her mouth.

  Totally bewildered, I waited until she said slowly, in that wary voice again, “It is an old thing. Mere superstition, many say. Please. Do not trouble yourself over such things.”

  She scooped up the books and fled.

  NINETEEN

  WELL, THAT WAS WEIRD, I thought as I looked at the now empty desk. But it was time to get ready for Aunt Sisi’s party, so I couldn’t track Theresa down and ask for an explanation.

  Like I said, I’d grown up with a serious shortage of relatives. Mom and Gran had been alone ever since their arrival in the United States, and Dad’s p
arents, who’d been even older when they had him than my parents had been when they had me, had passed away before I was born. If Dad had cousins, he’d never met them; his parents had come out to California after the war. So I was excited to meet my first relatives, but a little apprehensive as well.

  I bathed, then took out the floral print dress that I’d worn to the wedding. As I brushed out my hair and pinned it up in a chignon I thought back over the day, wondering why that “Blessing” would upset Theresa. Should I pretend our conversation about the Fyadar stories had never happened? I’d take her behavior as a clue next time I saw her.

  It was tall, sober-faced Tania, and not Theresa, who knocked on my door to say that the car was here for me. As I went downstairs, I looked around for Theresa. Nowhere in sight.

  “Mam’zelle,” the chauffeur said, opening the car door.

  We didn’t drive all that far—a couple miles of winding streets along which the houses got grander and grander. We pulled up in front of a handsome, fresh-painted house built along Roman villa lines, complete to the Corinthian columns. Remembering what Alec had said about Ruli’s habits, I waited where I was. Sure enough, the chauffeur came around to open the car door for me.

  I was halfway up the tiled steps when the double doors to the house opened. The man who greeted me at a Proper Distance was an honest-to-Jeeves butler, right down to white gloves.

  “Mam’zelle. By what name shall you wish to be announced?”

  “Kim . . . Atelier.”

  As soon as it was out, I grimaced. Stupid—the impulse had been to hide my last name so Alec wouldn’t find out I was here, but he was going to find out anyway, wasn’t he? The people I was about to meet were connected to him politically, and maybe by blood, and were supposed to be by marriage soon. The point being, one thing I’d learned through watching my friends who have large families—relatives talk.

  But Jeeves was too intimidating for me to try a “No, wait, call me Murray.” So I figured, go with it. In a way, the Atelier thing was legit, and I could always explain later once I’d found a sympathetic new cousin or two.