Mark de Silva - Square Wave

Knox set the book down on the trunk and sat in silence. The flask of arrack shone in the light of the candle. Rutland took it to his lips but only a trickle of spirit remained, just enough to numb his tongue. Knox excused himself with a half-hearted wave, taking the Book with him into his room, which left Rutland to watch the tallow burn.

III.

Scabbarded men stood along the edges of the main hall, facing its walls like dunces in a room with too few corners. They’d each slipped a stopper out, eye-level and wide as a face. Through these gaps in the wall they looked out into the torch-lit court. Along the thick outer-court walls, in the hollow spaces scattered throughout, another set of men positioned themselves the same way, facing out into the broader village, where conversations were had, trade was conducted, life was lived.

Then there were the roamers, and sometimes he, Rajasingha, was one of them. Only the very closest to him knew. On these nights, his face was darkened a shade, and his locks, usually pristine, were made stringy and left to hang haphazardly around his ears, like an old warrior’s. The king would be clothed like the middling ranks of the court (he had several swords marked with the shields of modest nobility).

Only after he’d officially retired to his quarters, not long after dark, would he begin his walk. Two guards stood by his chamber doors as he wandered the court, the night’s gossip begun. He talked to no one, only listened, and if called out to, or interrupted, he pretended not to hear, and sometimes not to see.

His purpose was, primarily, ostensibly, security. From his watches and guards much intelligence came to him, but the mediation introduced impurities. Depending on the messenger, the information would be colored in one way or another, and this was not always, or even often, intentional.

He was sure there was much that was being misapprehended, when it wasn’t simply missed altogether. It wasn’t arrogance or vanity that made him think few of his officers could hope to see as he did. Keeping his kingdom alive this long, through the many years of tumult, coming from all directions, within and without, demanded an otherworldly sense for tone, for gesture: a capacity to see the future in things.

He didn’t acquire this sense through ruling. It came first, and it was what marked him as a ruler, the almost disinterested pleasure he took, even as a child, in understanding the effects of his actions: what would become, when he no longer needed a guardian and ascended to power, the ripples of his rule. A king had to take this relish, directed to no end, to stay king.

Nearly every night-walk shuffled the order of faith he had in the great nobles of the court. There were, in truth, many in the middle who neither rose nor fell much, being neither confidants nor traitors. But some near the lower margin, the threshold, would rise high up into safer territory, sometimes to a place that made them for a time unimpeachable. Others would fall from these heights to somewhere near the margin. The problem only occurred when a great man already near the margin fell, thereby crossing the threshold.

Reasons would then be found. When treason could be imputed, the execution was public. When the case was harder, a vanishing followed. Sometimes this was an exile; usually it was a private execution.

There were a very few cases, no more than half a dozen, where, owing to discoveries made about the man, usually during a later watch, either by the watchmen or the king himself on one of his night-walks, a noble who had fallen below the threshold would right the wrong that had caused the fall before it was feasible to have him disappeared or killed. Curiously, none of these men ever fell out of the king’s graces again.

Against the wishes of his aides, Rajasingha would pass the inner wall of the court and roam the village, a less manicured space, freer in form, centerless and so more hazardous. Here he would stroll through the lanes and splitting byways on which the village houses and markets were arranged. His stride would shorten, or he would pause altogether, and by his expression pretend to decide whether to enter a shop, say, or take a rest on a rock.

When they’d started these watches, soon after the rebellion, Rajasingha frequently heard unflattering things said about his rule. But open criticism soon disappeared after the watches began, as the Court always seemed to know what the people said or did, even in private.

Dissatisfaction fell away into code. A second language, compounded out of the first, in which hybrids of existing phrases, placed back to back, came to mean something else, took hold in the kingdom. Everyone was soon bilingual at least.

When this tongue drew notice — the watches grew bilingual too — these sentiments were shunted into gestures, looks. But from the many eyes of the king these were no safer. Use of these codes and gestures, when discovered, led to various sorts of seizures, always disguised, tailored to the circumstance, and laced with the moral significance, the cruel wit, of parables. A man’s yard might be taken for use by the state in the cultivation of a public garden, if he’d been found to have complained, in the wrong tones, about the condition of the village. Cattle might be led away on an alleged suspicion of disease — for the king’s use if they were grand, to slaughter and destruction otherwise — if the grievance concerned inadequate supplies of water or cattle feed, which were regulated by the councilors. Or a son might be conscripted for a servant’s role in the temple if a family’s objection was to the coziness between royals and monks.

Repercussions could be more serious, if the king was in the mood: the destruction of crops on which taxes had failed to be paid in full, apparently through natural disaster, but in reality through localized flooding in the night. Or something as simple and devastating as the outing of a couple having an affair, as the king, though estranged from his own wife, was faithful still, and held fidelity in high regard.

To some villagers and townsmen, this was all the simple meting out of justice, and a miraculous one at that. It seemed to them that the king really was a god now, so much did he know about their lives. Their complaints stopped in all its forms. It was churlish and vain, they thought, to question the divine order, one that the king’s newfound omniscience gave them a greater faith in than ever before.

Others, though, turned to a different kind of silence. Strictly faultless, always possibly meaningless, a mere lull in the conversation, silence was recruited to indicate unsayable points of dispute with the kingdom. What exactly the interlocutors took from these silences, what idea was ultimately exchanged, couldn’t be known. It was never used systematically enough for that, which made it safe from interception, from translation, by the king’s watches. In truth it was less an exchange than an improvisation, one man intuiting, with only silence as his guide, what was felt by another.

IV.

Dressed in the clothes of a European man he never met, whose fate he didn’t know, Rutland entered the royal martial quarters, a few miles from Digligy, and sat on the broad wooden bench near the door.

There was Haas, captured in a night raid on a Dutch fort, smiling and chatting in his mother tongue with Van Holten, his comrade, who sat next to him with a swatch of cloth in his hand, polishing an already gleaming snake, the delicately wrought hilt of a longsword. There was Marco da Silva, heavily stubbled, black hair falling in rings down his bright collar, whistling a tune — trying, it appeared, to drown out the Dutchmen, if only in his own ears. Then there was Michel Veneres, pacing the room in high brown boots and a flowing vest that seemed to have tails, idly drawing his finger across the shields hanging from the walls.