They turned the knob and announced, deferentially, “Corporal Owen Mallory, ma’am.”
I had a fleeting impression of wealth—velvet drapes, waxed parquet—before my eyes landed on a heavy desk and, sitting behind it, a woman.
I’d never seen her before in my life, but I had the brief, disorientingsense that I knew her. I knew the sleek brass of her hair, styled so perfectly it might have been strapped on, like a helmet. I knew the clear blue of her eyes and I knew—Iknew—that voice: “Thank you for coming, Corporal Mallory.”
It was thethank youthat did it. Suddenly I was back in the field hospital after the dunes, listening to that voice thank me for my sacrifice to crown and country.
I froze two steps across the parquet, contorting into a panicked gesture somewhere between a salute and a bow. “Oh my God, ma’am—Minister Rolfe—”
A low laugh, which managed not to be mocking. “Call me Vivian. Sit down.”
I settled myself, carefully not imagining what my father would say if he knew his son was on first-name terms with Vivian Rolfe.
She regarded me across the polished expanse of her desk. She was always perfectly composed in her speeches and appearances, no matter what the opposition said or did.
But now she looked a little harried. Two of her nails had been badly chewed, and the starch had gone out of her collar, so that it lay limp against her collarbones.
She set a slim cigarette between her lips and leaned minutely forward. An awkward beat passed before I fumbled the matchbook from my coat pocket and cupped a flame between us. The light settled in the hollows of her face, finding the skull beneath her skin. I couldn’t tell how old she was.
She exhaled a long white plume and said, pensively, “You’d think it would have been enough. There were losses, to be sure, but we won. Our oldest enemy, thrown down! If I were a man, he’d be crowning me by now.”
“Ma’am?” I offered, intelligently.
She cut me a wry, pitying look. “Chancellor Gladwell has asked for my resignation. Imadethat boy—does he think he would have been reelected without a war?—but now they’re whining about the budget and the cost of reconstruction, and they’ve found just the woman to blame.”
“Oh,” I said. In the silence, the faint sound of chanting could be heard from the window.
Vivian rubbed her temples. “And those bastards simplyrefusetoshut up.” I tried not to blink, because I’d read somewhere that blinking was a sign of guilt. She added, wistfully, “I’d have them rounded up like cattle, if I could.”
The dispassion in her voice sent a chill over my scalp. My father had so far suffered no worse than a ritualistic series of arrests and fines, but suddenly I could imagine his body splayed on the capitol steps, the butt of a rifle raised above him. I made a mental note to remind him to start using a more difficult cipher for his letters and pamphlets.
Vivian tapped her cigarette twice on the lip of an ashtray. “But nothing is ever handed to us, is it, Corporal Mallory? This country may not believe in me anymore”—a self-deprecating laugh, only slightly bitter—“but I’ll be damned if I stop believing in it.”
“Ma’am?” I said again.
Vivian rolled her neck from side to side, and when she looked at me again a subtle transformation had taken place. Her spine had stiffened and her shoulders moved back, so that the points of her jacket drew a perfect line in the air. All the irony and weariness had leached from her face and left behind a quiet, earnest zeal. She looked both younger and much older.
When she spoke again, it was in the flowing, modulated voice I heard on the radio. “Our country is at a crossroads. Finally, after centuries of strife, we stand as Yvanne imagined us: a nation united, at peace. But peace is a fragile, fleeting thing. It must be protected, fought for, defended against all threats, native and foreign alike—and I fear we have grown weak.”
I felt I ought to nod, so I did.
“I don’t refer only to the obvious dissidents—at least they care, in their misguided way, about the future of the nation. It’s the disinterested, the doubtful. It’s the empty pews in our churches and the apathy in our schools. The young people who don’t know where we came from or what we fought for. We’ve forgotten—as a nation, as a people—who we are.”
All of these were lines from her speeches, which left me with the sweaty, trapped feeling that I was the only person in the audience of a one-woman play. I wished, passionately, that I’d taken off my coat.
But then Vivian pulled something heavy from a drawer and set in on the desk between us with the muted clack of wood on wood, and I forgot about my coat.
A book.Thebook. I leaned toward it, pulled by whatever secret gravity had sent it to me in the first place.
“I read your article about the grail. Brilliant work.” (When Professor Sawbridge had read that article, she’d sighed for a long time and said:You may be a patriot or a historian, Mallory, but not both.) “You argued that anation is not a boundary on a map or a flag on a pole, but only a story we tell about ourselves.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“It’s a hell of a story, isn’t it?” One of Vivian’s fingers, long and delicate, touched the cover. It was not a reverent or thrilled touch, but the casual, possessive gesture of a reader to her favorite book. “Honor. Courage. Tragedy. The villains cast down, the hero triumphant, the rightful queen restored. And yet, it fades. The people forget. It’s time we remind them.”
She traced the circle of the device on the cover and then, abruptly, slid the book several inches toward me. “You have served your country well, Owen Mallory.” She met my eyes and her voice fell nearly to a whisper. “Are you the man who will save it?”
Some latent desire in me—to kneel, to surrender myself to some grander purpose—to erase the ignominy of my origins and earn my place at last in the grand tradition of Dominion—unfurled inside me. Vivian Rolfe looked at me so steadily and for so long that I felt the light contract around us, so that I imagined the shadow of a crown on her brow, felt the phantom weight of a blade on my shoulders.
