I stood when the train dinged. The boy nodded to the book. “What’s it called?”
It occurred to me that, if I translated and published the book in my hands, he might one day read the title himself. Perhaps he would dream then of knights and swords and glory, as I had. Perhaps those dreams would send him to war—the next one, or the one after that—and perhaps he would come back broken, bent subtly out of true. As I had.
Something swelled painfully in my chest—guilt, I thought. “The Death of—” I began, but your name caught like a sob in my throat.
Before I stepped off the train I scrounged a few coins—too many—from my wallet and stuffed them awkwardly into his small, scarred hands.
I didn’t touch the book, that first day.
I drew the curtains and went directly to bed, still in my slacks and undershirt, as I often did. The doctors had listedfatigueamong my many symptoms, but I didn’t sleep because I was tired; I slept because I dreamed, and every dream was of you.
They were not always pleasant. I saw you weeping and bleeding, killing and dying. I saw you on your knees and I saw you on your bier, and I woke with tears on my cheeks and a tremor in my hands.
But other times I saw you laughing, head thrown back. I saw you above me, beneath me, pink and urgent, and when I woke, I would touch myself before even opening my eyes, aching for a memory that never happened.
That night I saw you white-faced, blue lipped, a ghost of yourself. You told me to wait for you, but when I woke, I couldn’t recall where.
I smoked two Lucky Stars. I drank a half pot of thin, acrid coffee. Then I opened the book.
Over the following week I fell into a sort of fever, translating without pausing to stretch or smoke, eating only when I felt myself flagging.
I decided very quickly that I disliked the author. His prose was stilted and portentous in a way that reminded me of narrators at the beginnings of films. And if he had truly ridden at your side, if he had stood in the court of Cavallon as you presented the grail to Yvanne—why hadn’t he saved you? I concluded he was a fellow coward and could not forgive either of us.
But even a coward couldn’t ruin a story like yours: the wild girl who became a knight; the knight who won her queen a crown and kingdom; the kingdom that would have fallen had it not been for the knight’s love and loyalty. I wept with pride when you slew the Hinterlanders and clenched my teeth with fury at Sir Ancel’s betrayal, though any child could have told you it was coming.
Ancel was the villain on every stage, the traitor in every political speech, the part no child wanted in the school play. Professor Sawbridge claimed there was contradictory material evidence of Ancel’s character—a few old tapestries and trinkets that portrayed him as a chivalrous, noble figure—but her article on the subject had been quashed by the Ministry of War.
I mailed her the relevant pages of my translation, along with a note; her replies were apparently too crude to make it past the censors.
On the sixth or seventh day I went out for cigarettes and milk.
It was hot, and the mood on the streets was strange. Half the shops had locked their doors in the middle of the day, and people were gathered in nervy, whispering clumps.
At the corner-store counter a man spat on my boots and called me a word I won’t repeat; from this I concluded there must have been unrest in the Hinterlands and made a mental note not to go out after dark. I was a proud son of Dominion, but—at night, when it was angry and drunk and no one was watching—Dominion would beat its children bloody.
It was a relief to return to the stale dark of my flat, and to the book.
But the book was gone. In its place there was a crisp white card, bearing no name, but only an address.
The city was even hotter now, and oddly quiet, like a held breath. It reminded me of that final morning before the dunes: hot and silent, full of hate.
The cabbie read the address on the card twice and spent the drive casting me narrow looks in the mirror. I wondered idly if it was my service jacket or my hair, or the fact that I hadn’t bathed or shaved properly in several days.
Half an hour later I stood blinking and sweating on the white marble steps of the capitol building, where a crowd had gathered. It was as if someone had picked up the city and tilted it, so that all the pedestrians slid to the center. They were all shouting.
Behind me, the driver said, venomously, “Traitors, the lot of you.”
In my ears, the noise of the crowd abruptly resolved itself into chants, of the kind I used to yell from my father’s shoulders before I was old enough to understand that protests were futile, shameful affairs that got your scholarships taken away.
I staggered back toward the cab. “Oh, no—I’m not with—”
“Owen? That you?”
I closed my eyes in brief but profound agony. I did not see, but physically felt, the cabbie’s nasty smile as he pulled away from the curb. I inhaled and exhaled twice before I faced my father.
He was moving as quickly as he could, shoving past his fellow protesters, limping badly. There was a disarming urgency on his face, as if ourlast conversation had never happened and all that mattered was that he reach me.
I pushed my spectacles farther up my nose, suddenly awkward after months of righteous silence. “Hello, Da—”
