Charles Newman - In Partial Disgrace

“You must be tired. I know I am,” he said. Then he sighed. “Is it permissible, to lose interest. . even in evil?” he asked gently. And when I mumbled incoherently, “It must be possible to do something, you just can’t let all this go to the hell. .” he reached across the wrought-iron table to put a cool hand over mine. “You can see that we are more pious, brave, and clever than the rest,” he said. “But you don’t seriously think we can be saved, do you?”

At midnight, we went for a swim in the Crab Pond and bade farewell to our adolescence. We bedded down on the sofas with the dogs wound tight about us, and broke the ancient rule of war, both going to sleep at once without a sentry.

Before first light I was awakened by hoofbeats. I peered out between the dusty damask curtains and could make out an Astingi patrol in jerkins of lilac, mulberry, and sulfur, bows and machine guns slung across their shoulders, winding single file down the fenlands from the source of the Mze. Their complicated demeanor was very like the frescoes of the former owners, at once both tranquil and agitated. Like their country, their aroma preceded them, a combination of dead lilies, saddle leather, jasmine, and mocha. They galloped once around the fresh grave mound in silent lamentation, and then wound their way down the drive, all pale hair and plumed shakos, lances and lopsided triple crosses. Their gray and white carts were tilted in their shafts from their burdens. Young girls in loose trousers, suckling buttoneyed infants, walked beside the black kneeboots of their mounted husbands, abetted by red rough-coated dogs and black unbelled oxen. Behind the last cart, on a silver chain, an eagle walked desultorily as a chicken. They moved in sluicelike silence, taking a shortcut around the town, and raising only a wisp of dust into the sunrise.

Dawn came early and pallid as a lemon-rind as the sun rose out of Russia. It was time to get down to business. I reminded Iulus of the crown. He threw up his arms as if in a mock surrender, and led me, chuckling, across the cour d’honneur to a small Tudor cottage connected by a broken arbor to an unkempt cutting garden. He turned on the gas lamp, and we picked our way across a floor littered with smashed flowerpots and broken-handled rakes and spades. The cottage’s shelves were filled with old letter files, metal cigar boxes, small carriage trunks, matched plaid luggage, Gladstone valises, and a great profusion of loose, half-destroyed papers. “Observations of a literary nature,” he reassured me, “and without intelligence value.” In a corner, amongst a huge nest of shredded correspondence, framed in a whelping box constructed of a dozen inlaid woods, a litter of just-weaned red pups yipped and scurried.

The crown was hung on a peg near a small rear window, its dull golden gleam and rough unfaceted dark gems testifying to an ancient, unrefined smelting process. It was topped with a bent lopsided triple cross, an exciting pagan touch. He handed it to me casually, pointing out the fragment of the Pope’s gemstone, Gemma Augustea, and the Byzantine silvery filigrance of the first czar, Monomach. And then he related the Astingi curse attached to that bizarre object, which translates imperfectly as, “Wear the crown and lose your culture.”

I also inquired, as instructed, as to the whereabouts of the Lost King.

“The King is hidden,” he snapped, “and shall remain so.”

Through the scent of milky feces, crusty gruel, and moldy paper, there was also the stench of fetid flesh wafting down from the sedge-green forest above us. He shot me a glance, and I knew it was useless to inquire further about our men behind the lines.

Sensing my discomfort, Iulus flipped the crown back on its peg like a horseshoe, leading me next door to the ruined cloister, which served as a barn, and where a cart filled with fresh straw, its tongues open, blocked the drive. He methodically harnessed the single horse left in the stable, a horse as calm and affectionate as a dog. It was not so much a horse as an enormous blocky blond pony, with Iron Age bones and a black dorsal stripe running down his back from forelock to tail. He was at least sixteen hands high, with a neck so strong it spoiled his shape, his hooves the size of dinner plates. Beneath the cart lay the parents of the litter, one dead, the other terribly aged. The mother had passed away that morning, her purple breasts exploding with mastitis, swollen white tongue clenched between her teeth. Next to her lay the sire, haunches twisted with arthritis, goatee and forepaws graying, his golden eyes clouded with cataracts.

Iulus moved deliberately but without distraction through the sad scene. He located some peasant Feastday costumery, though they were hardly actual peasant clothes, for they were beautifully made, never-worn attic costumes out of a comic opera, with velveteen capes, horn buttons, crocheted sleeves, and patent leather boots draped loose about the ankle, their only camouflage being the absurd distance they put us from the present grisly proceedings. They were, in fact, costumes from the pageant collection of the royal family, who during summer vacations near Semper Vero liked to dress as peasants and live “the simple life.” It was the only uniform Iulus could think of that would not compromise us with some faction in Cannonia, where seven different wars now raged. And I realized for the first time that he meant to accompany me out.

Iulus packed up the crown in a rucksack using great piles of manuscript for wadding. Then he deliberately filled a plaid valise with files, a Gladstone with correspondence, and a velvet ladies’ hat box with the plates of the Cannonian currency and the kennel studbook. He took particular care with a hand-tooled leather box with a raised monogram, Z. Then he picked up each of the nine pups under their front legs, and bussing them on the nose, buried them in the cart of straw. We mounted up on the narrow wooden seat, where I was happy to ride shotgun, and when he lay a gentle bootheel on the animal’s rump, the pony immediately broke into an electrifying tolta —faster than a walk, gentler than a trot.

As the cart creaked away, leaving the old sire exposed, like the great Old One, mauled by the young, who bleeding away sires a thousand sons. Picking up his ears and raising his still massive chest, he passed a curdling glance in our direction. His haunches quivered as if to follow us, but he soon thought better of it, and as the cart spewed gravel in its wake, turned his head away as if content with our receding echo. We set off into a pewter Cannonian mid-morning, green turds spinning out of the blond horse, and I felt the double melancholy of not only leaving a place to which I might never return, but of leaving a place that I was not sure existed. I turned for a final glance of Semper Vero. Across a bold curve of the Mze, a filmy veil of fog was rolling down the mountain spurs, and from the central turret of the manor, a single cloud pennon streamed. Then the translucent clouds deepened and darkened, and swiftly, almost instantaneously, at high noon, the light failed. In the dying afterglow, the country stretched into the nothingness beyond. Oh, how this soldier-boy wanted something different to belong to!

We rode in abrupt and arbitrary transition, just as in popular books, forded the shallow Its easily, and were gradually joined on either flank by solemn corteges of Astingi, winding across the blackened fields of no-man’s-land, to take shelter with us on the far side of the river. Their movement had none of the hallmarks of an advance or retreat. No weapons, insignias, or standards were on display. Legless veterans were carried on the shoulders of others. The men in their raspberry overcoats or menacing black felt cloaks, whips looped about their waists, rode in a mute assembly about the wagons of women and children, their great wheeled kettles and mobile hookahs in a fluid organization which required not a single verbal order. It was less an army than a biological force, simply crossing yet another river, another journey from nowhere to nowhere; for they had already forded the Mze twice upstream, in order to ford it again. The Astingi were laconic and expressionless, without so much as a backwards glance at their homelands. In their easy ancient resignation, they seemed neither warriors nor victims. Their very posture, their impressive silence, seemed only to indicate that entering history at its “cutting edge” was for them the most boring place to be.