The Hod King

by Josiah Bancroft

  The stag accepted Senlin’s gratitude with a curt nod, then said, “May I offer you a parting word of advice? The Sphinx is not often agreeable, but she is very rarely wrong. Avoid your wife if you can. You’ll both be safer if you do.”

  Not knowing what to say, Senlin gave a stilted bow, took up the handles of his trunk and suitcase, and set out across the narrow path of old wood and open air.

  Chapter Four

  Originally, the parrots of Pelphia served as town criers. They raised the alarm when fires, rogues, or raiders threatened the peace. But more recently, a neurosis has gripped the flock: The birds have become insatiable gossips. Do not be surprised if a parrot divulges a neighbor’s secret or your own.

  —Everyman’s Guide to the Tower of Babel, VII. III

  Even from the safety of his hotel room days later, Senlin still shuddered when he thought about his walk to the Pelphian port. Twice, a bird had sprung out of an unseen cleft in the rock face, nearly driving him over the brink with surprise. He’d lost count of all the planks that had cracked and fallen away when he tested them with his toe. One long section of the decking was slick with an oozing flow from the Tower, which he could not identify and did not investigate. By the time he reached the edge of the port, shrouded behind a line of potted palms, Senlin was certain he’d sooner exit via the black trail than return the way he’d come.

  Despite the Sphinx’s direction to mind his own business, Senlin had only lasted a day before he gave in to his instincts and mailed a letter to the duke. He wrote under his pseudonym, of course, but included his real address at the hotel. He fabricated a pretense for why the two of them should meet, a plot that he would later admit was not his finest. Then, before he could lose his nerve (or perhaps return to his senses), Senlin handed the letter over to the concierge to address and deliver. Since parting with the letter, Senlin had alternated between cursing himself for being so rash and then resisting the temptation to send a second inquiry. He couldn’t say, moment to moment, whether the idea of receiving a response from the duke was a source of excitement or alarm.

  But he was certain of one thing: He could not spend another evening waiting and worrying alone in his hotel room. He needed to have his thoughts interrupted; he needed a distraction: a lecture or a play, perhaps. The odds of him bumping into Marya or the duke were slim. It was a big city, after all! Meanwhile, the odds of him pacing himself into an early grave only grew by the hour.

  The decision made, he thrust his arms into his second coat and dashed out the door.

  The corridor of the Bon Royal Hotel roared. Tourists in coattails and long-trained gowns coursed down the hall like an outgoing tide. Top hats, turbans, and parasols bobbed above the flow like the flotsam of a shipwreck. A wave of gentlemen lit cigars, adding a heavy fog to the surge. Senlin slipped into the current and let it carry him down the stairs that were as wild as a waterfall, out to the lobby, and finally onto the street.

  The stars were out, or rather the city manager had turned the twinkling pilot lights up to full blast. The constellations all shone a uniform yellow, forming shapes that called to mind a mobile over a crib more readily than the cosmos. The outlines of a tiger, and a schooner, and a wine bottle filled the ceiling above his wedge of the noisy plaza. Wealthy men and women rode above the crowd on golden chairs, their litters carried on the shoulders of footmen. Boys on stilts strode between them, selling cigars and fresh flowers. Music poured from the Vivant. The crowds inside the Colosseum howled.

  Senlin’s prior expeditions to the Colosseum had taught him that it was impossible to travel anywhere quickly. If the crowd didn’t detain you, a spectacle surely would. On his first foray across the soap-white plaza, Senlin had been waylaid by a crowd who’d gathered to observe a duel. The two men stood frozen in the fencing position, exchanging heated (if not creative) quips, until it became apparent they intended to shed more spit than blood, and the crowd dispersed. The following day, he had come across an unconscious woman, splayed upon the arms of a small crowd, all dutifully fanning her toward revival. Concerned for the woman’s well-being, Senlin joined the effort just in time to see a bottle, clearly marked with skull and crossbones, pried from her hand. A physician tried to take the woman’s pulse at her neck, at which point she began to giggle and writhe. His suspicion pricked, the doctor smelled the “poison” and pronounced it gin.

  The spectacle this evening turned out to be a young woman wearing a flocky white dress. It appeared as if she’d somehow gotten her head stuck in a birdcage. The wicker cage, lanced here and there with freshly cut flowers, enclosed her face and her golden curls entirely. She gamboled through the crowded piazza like a waltzer without a partner. Senlin saw her coming from some distance and tried to avoid her, but she locked eyes with him through the wicker bars and would not let him elude her no matter how he sidestepped. She bounced upon his chest theatrically, clearing a little space around them, and then clutching her caged head, she cried, “Oh, the dark! I can’t stand it! I repent! I repent! Have mercy!”

  A pair of passing port guards laughed, comprehending the joke that Senlin did not. She pulled a white carnation from the bars and tucked it into Senlin’s breast pocket.

  “Thank you,” he said. “Are you supposed to be someone in particular?”

  “Aren’t we all?” she said, already twirling back into the collapsing mob, crying as she went, “Oh, the dark! Oh, the wretched dark!”

  Senlin pulled the flower from his pocket and smelled it. The scent conjured up a flock of unwanted memories. He saw the flash of the sun on the ocean outside his cottage window, inhaled the hazy smell of his flowering hedge, and heard Marya humming in another room.

  He dropped the bud underfoot and hurried on.

  The plaza was too much for him. Having no destination in mind, he followed the gaps in the crowd back to the spokes and rungs of the city streets, all spotted like a leopard with illuminated plates. When the lane was obstructed by ladies boarding a line of rickshaws he moved to the sidewalk, and when that was blocked by a gang of yapping dandies, he fled into an alley.

  Party streamers hung like cobwebs between the buildings. Three parrots observed him from the rail of a balconet. One of the red-pinioned birds squawked, “You burned the roast, you stupid cow!” The crimson fellows on either side of him whistled and repeated, “Burned the roast! Burned the roast!” Senlin buried his hands in his pockets and hurried on, kicking a path through the newspaper and confetti. He told himself: He must listen to the Sphinx. He must be patient. He must keep his distance.

  A clapboard shed stood against one wall of the alley. When he passed it, he glimpsed through the cracks in the door a bald hod inside, squatting upon heels with his eyes closed. In the next alley, he encountered another shed, then another, none larger than a casket, each humble as an outhouse. Senlin wondered how many of those poor wretches had begun as tourists, how many had abandoned happy if unremarkable lives, how many had lost their husbands, their children, their wives?

  Again, he told himself he must be patient. He must keep his distance. He certainly mustn’t, for example, go see the musical inspired by Marya’s life and history, which the Daily Reverie’s theater critic had called “a revelation on the order of birth, death, and chocolate ganache.”

  A smaller parrot on a windowsill overhead fixed him with a doll-like gaze and screeched, “You stupid cow!”

  “All right! All right!” Senlin shouted back, at last admitting to himself that perhaps his walk had not been entirely without pretext or destination from the beginning. “I’ll go see the play.”

  The front of the Gasper Theater reminded him of a young woman’s boudoir: all voluptuous cornices and plaster garlands. He stood in line, bought a ticket for the best remaining seat, and went inside. There was no lobby, only a dimly lit tunnel into the auditorium, where playbills crowded and overlapped in a competitive jumble, like initials carved on a schoolyard tree. Senlin did not recognize any of the titles. He accepted a program from an usher
and found his seat in the fourth row.

  He’d first learned of the play’s existence when he’d happened upon a review in the Daily Reverie. The play had debuted three months earlier in April and was widely considered a triumph, though some complained about the casting, particularly the woman who played Marya. In his lengthy write-up, Oren Robinson described the actress as “a mockingbird singing a nightingale’s song.”

  Despite the program’s claim that the play was “a true history of Duchess Marya Pell, as approved by the duchess herself,” Senlin didn’t expect the play to be perfectly factual. If guides and histories took creative license, why wouldn’t a play? Still, he hoped the show might give him a glimpse into Marya’s experience since their parting.

  The play commenced with a drone of tubas and bassoons. The curtain rose on a shoreside scene—a canvas beach, heaps of fishing nets, and a backdrop of blue sky and green sea. A ship’s prow protruded from offstage. Stuffed seagulls were wired to its rails. Fishermen in waxy overalls pretended to chop papier-mâché fish on a wood block. Women in aprons held dolls on their hips and hung fake fish on racks to dry.

  The starlet entered in a rush, and the audience applauded furiously.

  The Mermaid’s dress was a little tattered at the hem but, in stark contrast to the other fishwives, was white and unstained. Her hair, obviously a wig of scarlet yarn, stood out in a wild thicket. Senlin cringed at the embellished imitation of Marya, but he could not look away. Barefoot, she ran back and forth across the stage, chasing after seagulls that swung through the air on wires.

  Her first lines were “The sea runs deep, and the mountains stand tall, but where they meet, mud buries all!” She slapped the back of a man chopping a paper fish. The actor laughed. She spun on her toe, animating her skirt enough to show her thighs. Senlin sank lower in his seat.

  Then he walked onto the stage. Or rather, the actor playing Senlin’s part in the Mermaid’s history arrived. He announced himself by blowing his nose into a handkerchief. He wore an ill-fitting brown suit and a crooked stovepipe hat. A prosthetic nose, large as a beak, had been glued to the actor’s face. While shaking out his handkerchief, he stumbled on a limb of driftwood. He paused to apologize to the log.

  The audience roared with laughter. The Mermaid said, “Oh, no! Headmaster Fishbelly!”

  Approaching the Mermaid, the headmaster said, “Little miss, shouldn’t you be home packing for our field trip? Have you forgotten we leave first thing in the morning?” Fishbelly had a heady, congested sort of voice that made him sound old and sickly.

  “But it’s such a glorious day!”

  “It’s a gray day,” Fishbelly said. “I’m sure it’ll rain.”

  “A glorious day!” the girl in the crimson wig insisted. The band began to play a lively tune full of sawing violins and piping flutes. The Mermaid strode about the stage, her arms swinging. She climbed upon the ship rails and hooked arms with the working women. All the fishermen beamed, their scowls broken by her playful antics. Their chores turned into choreography. Everyone danced, save Fishbelly, who blew his nose into his handkerchief and examined the results as if he were trying to read his tea leaves.

  The song mocked the boring, scrounging life of the sea. The wives clapped; the fishermen swung their catch by their tails; and the Mermaid led them in a chorus line at the front of the stage. Fishbelly chased after her: grasping, falling short, becoming tangled in the nets. When the song ended, Fishbelly scolded her, shaking his finger while she shook her head. He wanted her to be careful, to be staid, to be quiet, because she was his favorite student, a distinction the Mermaid clearly did not want.

  The villagers drifted from the stage. A painted moon lowered from above. A cello began a gloomy drone.

  “You won’t be a girl much longer, little miss,” Fishbelly said. “Soon, you will be old enough to marry.” He touched her cheek and she recoiled from his veiny hand. He didn’t seem discouraged by her revulsion. “You will need a guide in this life. And who better to guide you than your trusted, beloved headmaster?”

  In the audience, Senlin’s stomach churned. He watched the beach disappear and a room take its place: a bed and a tattered afghan, an ancient vanity with a tarnished mirror. A faded bouquet of flowers hung among a string of paper dolls on the wall. It was unmistakably a young girl’s bedroom. Inside, the Mermaid packed for the trip, happy and blithe and unaware that Fishbelly lurked in the shadows outside her window.

  While he spied on her, he sang a sinister song about his plans for tricking her into marrying him. The audience booed his strategy, but applauded the actor’s rich baritone, which was nothing like his character’s phlegmy speech.

  As nauseating as this version of him was, Senlin took comfort in the fact that it was also patently false. Was it any surprise that the duke would want to see Marya’s previous marriage written out of her history? Was it any surprise that he would take the opportunity to skewer her first husband? But what did Senlin care what the duke thought of him? Let the man have his petty revenge! It revealed nothing of Marya’s feelings. So far, the details of this supposed “true history” were the sort of thing one would divulge to even a casual acquaintance. The rest was just lies!

  A paper sun rose, and the stage changed again, this time becoming two boxcars in a train, cut in half so the audience could see their interiors. The backdrop moved. The painted hills and hamlets seemed to flow by.

  Fishbelly’s class was introduced as they boarded the passenger car, six children in all, who, when posed in a line, formed a perfect little stair of age and height. Fishbelly alternated between scolding and swatting at his students, who were all rosy cheeked and dressed in pinafores. Quickly tiring of the effort, Fishbelly sank into an empty seat by the window, took out a book, and began to read aloud. “It says here in the Everyman’s Guide, which is the most reliable book ever written on the subject, that in the Tower, all we will need are handkerchiefs!” The man at Senlin’s elbow laughed so hard he began to cough.

  “What about maps and tickets and reservations and a plan?” the Mermaid asked as she attempted to corral the children onto the bench seats.

  “Two handkerchiefs apiece!” Fishbelly declared. Setting down his book, he stood and passed out the white pocket squares to the confused children, then returned to his reading, apparently satisfied that his duty had been done.

  The Mermaid, who seemed to be growing more mature by the moment to compensate for Fishbelly’s disregard, gathered the wilding children to the dining car, leaving the headmaster with his beak in his book.

  In the dining car, a porter told them they couldn’t have any tea because all the teacups were being used. The Mermaid said that it was quite all right and asked him to bring a big pot of tea anyway. Then she opened the colorful carpetbag she carried with her and unpacked seven teacups onto the table. The youngest child pointed out that the cups had all been broken and glued back together. When another asked why she kept broken cups, the Mermaid stroked their cheeks and touched their noses and sang a ballad while they listened attentively. The chorus of her sentimental lullaby went: “It’s perfectly all right not to be perfect. A chip or a crack can be precious, too.”

  The words pierced Senlin like a stake. He shut his eyes and wished he could plug his ears. Marya had told the duke about her beloved heirlooms, and about his inane obsession with handkerchiefs, and about his idiotic faith in the Everyman’s Guide. Why would she share such intimate details if not to inspire intimacy? And if she was being so frank with the duke, why had she then authorized this grotesque vision of him: a big-nosed, lecherous boor?

  Unless she thought it fair. Unless she found it true.

  The play continued through scenes in the Basement, where the Mermaid narrowly survived swindlers and thieves, and on to the Parlor, where dozens of identically dressed Mr. and Mrs. Mayfairs argued and reconciled, danced and canoodled, while the Mermaid weaved through them, singing an ironic verse about the joys of marriage. In the Baths, she was immediately a
pproached by a hunchbacked painter in beret and smock, who lured her to his studio apartment with promises of a warm meal and a sympathetic ear. Once there, his vile intentions were quickly revealed. When she refused to undress for him and lie upon his wretched mattress, piled with stained rags, the deformed artist began to chase her about. He sang a feverish song about what an honor it was that he should invite her to “thrive upon my canvas, then writhe upon my bed.”

  Just when the grotesque, wild-eyed artist tore the Mermaid’s sleeve from her dress and trapped her against his bed, the trumpets in the orchestra blew a fanfare. A troop of men rushed onto stage. Their leader, a handsome blond with a beard shaped like a spade, drew his sword. Behind him, a man in white pajamas with red-painted hands was followed by soldiers in black jackets.

  “Get off of her, you villain!” the handsome lead cried. The audience cheered. “I am a duke of the ringdom of Pelphia, and this woman is under my protection.”

  The painter whirled about, drawing a pistol from under his oily smock. He fired, and the flash of powder felled one of the duke’s men.

  The duke dashed forward and plunged his sword under the painter’s arm.

  “Mercy, sir! Have mercy! I am but a cripple!” the painter cried.

  “If you’re hale enough to torment this woman, then you’re well enough to suffer my sword.”

  The Red Hand dragged the blubbering artist offstage, singing a nursery rhyme about the hods and the hollow ground as he went. The two uninjured soldiers removed their fallen comrade, leaving the duke and the Mermaid alone.

  A spotlight swaddled them. The tragic scene all but vanished. She stood, her face turned down, looking as vulnerable as a scolded child.

  “Are you all right?” the duke asked.

  The Mermaid threw her arms around his neck, kissed his cheek, and between sobs, blessed and thanked him. The music swelled with the intro of their now-famous duet: “The Heart Is Lost When Love Is Found.”