Mark de Silva - Square Wave

The room doubled as an armory. Some of the arms were European, some were local but forged in their style. Like Rutland, Veneres was a volunteer, an unlucky trader of a nation with no stake in the island, not a martial capture like the Portuguese or the two Dutchmen, though he’d committed some time ago to the group.

It had been two weeks since, against Knox’s advice, Rutland agreed to join the European squads the king was assembling to train and lead his Sinhalese brigades. The Englishman and Frenchman, though traders only, were added to this, one of the lead squads, for the prestige, it was thought, of having all-European units.

All of them had been in captivity on the island at least several years. None longer than Rutland, though, who’d been held almost two decades now. All knew some Sinhalese. But the Dutchmen knew more English than Sinhalese. The Frenchman knew more still. The Portuguese and the Englishman knew only their own languages. The group spoke an immature pidgin, still rough and prone to breakdown, drawn from these languages.

They were given the finest arms in the king’s possession. Frequently this meant being reunited with their own or their brethren’s, the spoils of Sinhalese raids on their forts. Haas’s arquebus hung from the wall.

Haas stood and greeted Rutland, though by this time he was already seated. The four of them, their glances happened to lock in a circle, two standing, two sitting, each one’s eyes on the next. The circle broke. Their eyes wandered again. The moment had served, though.

Veneres paced and spoke to Rutland for the group, in fine English, about their treasonous task. With a hard-edged vagueness that astonished, he talked of difference, of sameness, of the future. These three together, he said, formed a dial, like the cindric mal, the flower clock used by the priesthood to time their chants, to bring them to a close, and to begin them again. The room fixed on Rutland, all but Veneres himself, who carried on fingering the arms.

V.

The king watched Rutland walk away, finely outfitted, his gilt scabbard catching the light, with a royal message for Knox. Rajasingha found himself on the cusp of a clearing, a new era, built on the backs of Europeans: four squads of fair-skinned men, sent down the mountain in a false alliance with the imperialists. They’d be disguised as plunderers, marauders, and escapees of his kingdom, talking of inroads, of exploitable weaknesses in Digligy and Kandy. The king’s own men, dark-skinned, many dozens of them, steeped in ambush, would be trailing just behind, guns and swords leering from the shrubs, ready to pounce on the invaders.

It would be the choice of Rutland and the others in these European squads. If they turned on the natives, and sided with their blood, they would be killed with the rest of the whites — first, in fact, as they were nearest the Sinhalese forces following behind. At the same time, retreat, if necessary, would still be possible for the king’s men. If, however, they remained loyal to the king, and Rutland and the others managed through their tales to disarm their own countrymen and convince them they were allies, victory would be simpler still. The reinforcing Sinhalese brigades, combined with the king’s European forces, would be too much.

Tomorrow the king would meet with Rutland’s squad. He thought of the 547 lives of the Buddha. He wondered how many he himself had, and which one this was.

VI.

The light came only from stars, and the stars were weak, so it fell just short of the world, leaving it visible but not quite seen, everything bathed in graphite blue. They’d arrived at the outer wall at the back of the palace. It was formed of rough-hewn stone drawn from the thickly forested valley they’d just crossed in the night.

Da Silva tested his grip on the wall. A rustling was heard. He lifted himself up off the grass. Haas signaled for him to wait till Van Holten and Veneres emerged from the brush — at the last minute, Rutland had abandoned the plan — but whether he understood or not, he began to climb. He had no sword, just a wide, short blade in his boot whose hilt rose up to Haas’s face as he ascended. The temptation to pull da Silva off the wall passed, partly because Haas wasn’t sure he’d get the better of him. The Portuguese was agile, a master of weaponless combat, and good with a blade too. They’d found that out in training. Da Silva had the knife to Van Holten’s throat when Haas intervened.

Da Silva stopped at the top without cresting the wall. The other men had collected at the bottom. Side by side, all but one started to climb. On the order of Veneres, the one playing watch at the base, they slipped over the top and into the darkness within.

The limed walls of the palace proper shone blue-white, the stars sufficing only to bring light to things that gave all of it back. Veneres came over the wall and settled in the grass. Another rustling came. A snake perhaps.

They saw no sentries at the back, at the two short palace doors. Above the doors, every few yards, there were black squares lining the wall. The king’s windows. Trees rose over the sides of the palace, twisting over the wall in both directions, creating broad patches of a slightly richer black in the yard.

The men crept along the semicircular wall in the darkness that reigned at its edge, headed for those windows, the king. As they approached they made out a massive form a third shade of black within the trees ahead. They decided it was a boulder. Then it was rumbling toward them at speed, cutting through the tall grass, squealing like an elephant. One by one, the men found themselves overtaken as their own squeals joined its, as life, this life, was stamped out of them, expelled from their bones.

VII.

Mud and water waist-high, Knox and Rutland inched through the mangroves with their bags held over their heads, looking for a way back to London, and finally, in Rutland’s case, to Kent. His bag was heavier than it should have been, but the journals and papers counted for a lot. The last one that went in was Darasa’s note. It had been sealed with an inscrutable stamp when it arrived by messenger, and it suggested just enough about the king’s treacherous plans for the European squads, Rutland felt, to impel him to flee with Knox into the northern swamps, looking for their people’s vessels along the upper coastline, if they could make it that far this time.

Rutland had delivered the king’s message to Knox, a spoken one, before Darasa’s arrived. Its complexion altered in the light, or perhaps the dark, of the monk’s note, as did the monk’s in its. In fact, Rutland had dispatched the very first of the three messages, to Darasa, about the circle of eyes he’d seen in the martial quarters. Now all their words could only be seen through the veils of the others’.

Rutland had taken his letter to the temple himself, in the early morning. He gave Darasa the Bible back at the same time, the pages speckled with water stains, or tears, it appeared, and marked by Rutland and Knox at passages that might be of special use now to the monk.

What Darasa had made of the note, and of the markings, Rutland didn’t know. An exegete of his caliber had every chance of cracking it. Both their notes, in fact, provided for the possibility of discovery and, by those means, the forestalling of a connivance. But courage couldn’t really be ascribed to the authors of these letters, since to the extent their messages were recovered, a duty, one attending the knowledge so imparted, was shunted from writer to reader.

It should be said, the king’s own message to Knox, in plain, bright language, yet so plain, so bright, it couldn’t be seen at all — Rutland and Knox never settled on an understanding of it — shared in this same negativity.