Mark de Silva - Square Wave

They might also achieve what any one of the essays could not. In the space of one lecture, the only one there might be now, he could still suggest a whole narrative, a destiny, this way. Because even dust could be shaped into a trail. What mattered was arrangement, order.

In fact he would be telling two stories at once, one about the past and another about the future. If he was betraying Kames in not delivering the more lucid lecture they’d agreed on, the one centered on the monk, he was also showing him a kindness. The trail would be an arrow. It would tell what Stagg knew about the circumstances, the tension, but without telling. The same way Kames liked to tell. From there, it would be up to him.

Though he wasn’t close to Kames, and didn’t especially trust him, he owed him something for giving him the chance to speak. More than that, there was kinship. Kames wasn’t wrong in thinking the country had reached a liminal moment in its history. Penerin and his kind wanted to deny this. They said everything could be recovered. But there were such things as faits accomplis. A world built around seducing the man in the street had managed to turn all the world out into that street. Now, almost everyone found the free world unlivable, chaotic, coarse. The invisible hand, Kames liked to say, turned out to have a very strong grip. It finally had all of them by the neck now, it seemed. Maybe he was right. It was time to lop it off.

Stagg unknotted the leather and pulled the small sheaf from the case. Tapping the pages on the edge of the lectern, he caught Kames’s eye, far in back and with his face already made up in a furrowed expression of concentration. He might have other things pressing on him just now. Stagg thought to say something that would suggest the change of plan. He thought to thank Kames. But no, both ideas might only corrupt the simple intention he had left, to read.

I.

Around that great table they sit in silence. Rajasingha’s attendants, noblemen in their own right, look on from a smaller table nearer the lake as the king takes his daily meal. So as not to contaminate the great man’s food, each wears a mask, sewn from the sun-bleached fibers of the coconut.

In all there are twenty dishes set out this afternoon: sambhur of the Highlands stewed in a thin, turmeric-laced gravy that is almost a broth; breadfruit garnished with cinnamon and lychees; river fish in a chili and cardamom curry; steamed pittu flecked with cashews, served with a tamarind sambal; fritters of rice-flour and jaggery; and fifteen besides. He will eat of only four or five of these.

The king makes a faint gesture toward the pot of boiled jack-fruit and lime. The nobleman closest ladles it onto a corner of the banana leaf from which the king is eating slowly, methodically, alone. Today’s meal is unusual only in that it is taken by Lake Kilara, at the royal retreat, the pleasure house. He’s here three or four times a year, usually for a few days only. The makeshift palace in newly royal Digligy, and in fact his very grip on the country, is under muted and perpetual threat. A populist rebellion forced him from the palace in Nillemby, westward into the mountains. And the Dutch have been making incursions eastward into the heart of the island, from Colombo, ever since making landfall on the southwestern coast four decades ago, around 1640. The twin forces have made Digligy his home and Lake Kilara his refuge.

The king finishes his meal and dismisses the others, who make their way beneath the overhanging lattice from the gazebo to the main complex. The noble servants, unmasked now, as the king has finished, take away the dishes. This will be their meal. He steps from the gazebo to the banks, thinking of the evening’s return to the palace. The sun has made a mirror of the lake. Dressed in a white tunic embroidered in red, his scabbard once again at his side, he begins to circle the lake, turning over the options.

Van Holten had said the Dutch forces stationed near Colombo were mounting a fresh campaign to capture the Highlands and the kingdom, that their flatteries, of defending His shores from the Portuguese, had always been hollow, from the time they’d arrived. The possibility now occurs to the king of making the Dutch, after all these years, finally mean what they say, by bringing them into a more profound conflict than they intend with their European brethren, the Portuguese, the kind that might weaken each enough to flush them both from the island.

The information had not been offered up of Van Holten’s will exactly. The king had first seen the soldier chained and starved outside the royal court, alongside other European captives. He’d been left behind by a retreating Dutch squad led by one Commander Haas. Only after weeks of being kept like this, exposed alternately to withering heat and violent rain, was Van Holten brought before Rajasingha. He was offered a peasant’s meal and some shade and that was the end of it. He told what he knew.

The king completes his circle of the lake. He’s decided to host the latest set of Dutch envoys offering a false peace. Back in the pleasure house proper, he sends his messenger down to the coast to invite their leadership to the royal court as guests of honor.

II.

Rutland walked in late to find Knox sitting on a stool, drinking palm whiskey in the living room. Before Knox could comment on the hour, Rutland set the Bible down over the brass rivets of the trunk, which had been pulled from the Ann , their captured frigate, twenty years ago by the Sinhalese. The spoils had spoiled, though. The rations were rancid and the clothing, stored in a separate compartment, had rotted not much differently from the meat. The Sinhalese had lost interest in the shrunken, sea-sodden box, and it was left to the two of them, Rutland and Knox, to discover its only remaining value, as furniture.

Knox leafed through the pages and his shipmate wondered if he would go through the same stages he himself had, now almost fifteen years ago, when the monk had given him the book: whether the surge of awe and gratitude would be overtaken by a stubborn sense of smallness.

But Knox’s eyes never lost their wideness. Immediately Knox’s father came to Rutland’s mind, the fevered one, delirious in his last days, talking mostly in Biblical snatches to his son and his earthly keepers, the two Sinhalese. They seemed to be the last fully formed sentences he possessed, at least the last of any complexity. It was as if their syntactic force, or else the depth of their entrenchment, had equipped them to crowd all else out of his mind. To Rutland this seemed an elevation of the Book at a cost to the man’s psyche, or else just the reverse.

He could see that Knox was also thinking of him, the old man endlessly apologizing for bringing his son along on this unholy “mission of exchange.” They were exchangers, Knox Sr. had said.

Sitting on the floor across from Knox, Rutland undid his boots, the leather rough and cracked. Knox started reading out passages of the Bible, lines his father had fixed on, near death and long before, back in England; lines he wanted to deliver now to his dead father, to Rutland, to all three of them. Each page was a trigger. On seeing the first few words, or even just the arrangement of the page, taking it in with a sweep of his eyes, the rest of the passage would follow like a stream. He would intone the words he saw in his mind, his eyes floating up to the other end of the house, the wall, the door, or the window, but never to Rutland.

Then he would turn a few of the supple vellum sheets — what merchant was missing this now? — take in another page, the flow and frame, and light on another line. Rutland hadn’t been much moved on seeing many of these lines himself, but he was moved by the effect they had on his friend.