The Eyes of a King (2 page)

I knew that I was going to read it. I wanted to find out what the writing said. Perhaps I had been stupid to be afraid; a book
could not harm me. I tried to open it again with my willpower. I concentrated my mind on it as hard as I could. My brain ached from the effort, but it didn’t work. The book stayed shut. I considered it for a moment, then snatched it up and opened it.

There were several blank pages. I turned to the beginning of the writing and started to read.

A
s the first sunlight drove out the bleak gray dawn, it glowed through the curtains of the hospital room. The young man opened them quietly and looked out. He watched the light cross the railway lines and spread over the roofs of the square gray houses. It transformed the ragged weeds on the siding into clear purple flowers standing motionless in the silence of the morning. The tears were running down his face, but he stayed there at the window until they were gone. A train passed and faded again. He thought of the people just waking in the houses, and the people on that train, who thought this was an ordinary day, when the sun had risen so differently to him.

The young woman called his name. He turned and went to her, and laid one hand upon the baby’s head. She did not wake. He took the woman’s hand. His eyes fixed on her for a moment, though she did not see it. Her blond ringlets fell onto the baby’s face as she held her, and she looked out the window, across the deserted tracks, to a broken fence where birds hopped and sang. They could not be heard through the glass, and the baby slept. The sunlight spread into the room and turned everything to gold.

A long time passed before the silence was broken. A middle-aged woman hurried in. She looked at the sleeping baby and began
to cry herself and then laugh, and the younger woman was laughing too and hugging her mother. The baby’s grandmother took something from around her neck. It was a gold chain with a heavy charm on it—a jeweled bird that caught the sun now and sent spots of light flying around the small white room. The baby opened her eyes suddenly, though it must have been chance. “Your necklace, Mam,” said the young woman.

“I will give it to her now,” said the older woman. “I will give this to my granddaughter.” She handed it to the baby’s father. “Keep it for when she’s older. One jewel is missing, but it always has been.”

“It doesn’t matter,” said the young woman. “Let her wear it now, Mam, just for a minute.” Her husband fastened the clasp around the baby’s neck and straightened the chain. The jewel came down almost to her waist, she was so small. In silence, they looked at the baby.

“I can tell already that she is going to be beautiful,” said the baby’s grandmother.

“I wish I could live to see her grow up,” said the man, and he kissed the baby’s face. A tear dropped from his eye onto her cheek, and she began to cry then too.

Far away in a lofty stone room, another baby was sleeping. His mother leaned over, pushing aside the velvet curtain of the bed, to watch him. Her husband had the baby in his arms while the priest spoke a blessing over the child. “Protect this prince and let him grow in wisdom,” the priest was saying, making the sign of the cross, but the king was not listening. His eyes were on his wife’s. The early sunlight reflected scarlet off her face, and her tiredness and that light made her look younger even than she was. The king tried to trace her face and his own in the child’s, then stopped
because it made the tears rise in his eyes. He was not yet eighteen and she was younger, and he felt like a boy now, with this baby in his arms.

Not long after the priest had gone, the baby woke. The king put him back into the queen’s arms carefully and knelt beside her, and they looked down at him in silence. Already his eyes were strange—large and dark, with an unusual strength for one so small. The eyes of a king, the people would say later. An odd stillness hung over the room as they watched the baby. He did not even cry. “What will this boy’s future be?” said the king, thinking of his own life.

“I have you, and now a son,” said the queen, brushing the tears off her face. “If we are always like we are now, if we always stay together, I will never ask for more than this the rest of my life.”

Five years passed and they were always together. And that last evening, the three of them were on the highest balcony of the castle when the queen heard shouts and turned to look down into the city. The prince and his father were fencing with wooden swords behind her. “What is it?” said the king, glancing at his wife.

“I cannot see.” She turned back to them. “Go on with your match.”

The king dropped the sword to his side and smiled. “I do not think I should be playing games like this.” But he handled the toy as if it was a real weapon. The queen smiled too, to see that.

The prince, catching his father off his guard, knocked the sword out of his hand. They all laughed then, and the king lifted his son and swung him into his arms. “He would make a fine soldier,” said the queen.

“Do not talk of that now,” said the king, stroking the child’s hair. “He’s still a little boy.”

Birds settled in the trees of the roof garden below. The sun was setting bloodred. They watched it in silence, standing together like any family anywhere. Then it was no longer silent; close by, people were shouting.

The castle gate fell with a loud explosion. Suddenly on their knees, the king and the queen stared at each other. “Don’t move,” the man told his son. Rebel troops were shouting below. Over the edge of the balcony, the boy could see them swarming into the castle yard like ants. The family clung together. The king drew a knife from his belt and it glinted red in the sunset. There was a sudden burst of gunshots in a room below. “They have guns,” the man breathed into his wife’s ear. “They have guns; is this possible? Who has been making guns?” She caught his hand; the small click of their two rings touching was harsh in the quiet.

Heavy footsteps were coming closer below the balcony door. The king stood up, and the queen followed. His eyes never leaving the door, the prince clutched at his mother’s hand and found it. She moved between him and the doorway. The footsteps came closer.

The door shot open, the king ran forward, and two gunshots echoed suddenly around the towers and rooftops of the palace. The knife fell from the king’s hand and clattered to the ground, and the king and the queen landed hard on the stone of the balcony. No one had resisted the attack. It had been too sudden.

There was silence. One minute the man and the woman had been living; the next they were not. The blood crept quietly over the stone, and no one moved.

The prince’s tears stuck in his throat, and he picked up the knife and threw it at the soldier who had shot. It sliced into his eye and the side of his face and stuck there for a moment. The man dropped the pistol and fell to his knees, his hands clasped to his
face. Blood spilled between his fingers, thick and dark, and spattered onto the stone. Another soldier raised his gun. “No!” cried the injured one, his hands still over his face. “Remember the prophecy! Do not kill the prince!”

They were on their way home. The girl—now five years old—and her grandmother. The radio was playing and the woman sang a few lines and turned it up louder. The little girl waved her arms like a dancer. Her grandmother laughed. “You’ll be dancing on a stage one day.”

“I hope I will, if I practice hard,” said the girl, so earnestly that her grandmother laughed again. The bird charm still hung around the girl’s neck, and her eyes had sharpened to a bright blue now—the same blue as the jewel in the center of the necklace, as though it had been made for her.

The lines of traffic moved fast. On the other side of the road, the cars stood in long queues, crammed close to each other. The girl began to doze in the evening light, rocking with every slight turn. Sandy shells and pebbles clattered on the dashboard. The woman reached across and touched her granddaughter’s cheek as she slept.

Suddenly horns blared through the music. A lorry swung across the road, rocking. The girl woke, confused and already screaming in the swerving car. The last thing she saw before darkness was her grandmother struggling to turn the wheel one way then the other, while lorries loomed over the car and tires screamed somewhere close. “It’s all right, it’s all right,” said her grandmother desperately, though the girl did not know why she was saying it. Then the car turned over and everything vanished.

The girl cried all that night in her mother’s arms, in a cold white hospital with the dark close outside. They could have gone home, but neither of them thought of it. The little girl had been here many times before. This was the hospital where she had been born; a year later she had been carried here every day for three weeks while her father was dying. She had been here many times before, but this was the time she would remember.

The boy cried too, suddenly alone in a strange country, with only a stranger who could not comfort him. He looked out at the evening star, the star that was the first to brighten outside his window in the castle, but even the star was wrong and different here. It was pale and faded in a dull orange-gray night sky. “Come away from the window,” said the stranger, putting a blanket about the boy’s shoulders. “Try to get some rest.” But the boy would not move. Not that night, or the next, or the night after that.

The girl lay on her bed and watched the same stars. She saw them appear in the evenings and fade in the mornings. She heard the clocks chiming in the city and counted each hour as it passed her by. But there was nothing they could do, either of them, to stop the time from passing.

The writing finished there. I sat still, the book open across my knees. The strange thing was that I had read this story before, I was certain. And it was not pretend. I was sure that it was real; it had really happened.

It might be, I thought, that the little boy was the prince who had been born the same year I had, the prince who was supposed
to have been exiled to that legendary country. Prince Cassius. What was the country’s name? Angel Land, or something very like. But that country was not real. Lucien’s troops killed everyone in the castle that night; they killed the king, and the queen, and the prince. His advisor Talitha had been responsible for it; she had great powers, and it would have been an easy thing for her to kill a five-year-old boy. This was no more than a story, then.

But what about the girl? Some of the words in the passage about her I did not understand. What was a car, or a dashboard, or a radio? They sounded like foreign words. Perhaps she was in another country. Perhaps Angel Land too. Then she also was pretend.

“Leo! Stirling!” my grandmother called. “Get up quickly. It will take longer to walk to school in the snow.” Stirling rolled over, muttering. I put the book into my coat pocket. I did not know yet what powers were in it, and I wanted to keep it with me.

As I went down to fetch water, I remembered that pretend country’s name. That legendary land, in another world, that my grandmother used to tell us fairy stories about. It wasn’t “Angel Land” at all. The name was “England.”

O
n the way to school, I was still thinking about the book. Where had the writing come from? Perhaps I should not have picked it up. The story was nothing to do with me, and now I might be involved with it. But I was interested; I could not help wondering if that boy was the prince, and if so, whether he
was still alive. If he was still alive, the prophecy could be fulfilled. But—

“Leo?” I came back from my thoughts. I was surprised to see the street and the snow and the houses still there. I turned to Stirling, jogging beside me. I had been walking fast, absentmindedly—too fast for him.

“What?” I said, slowing my pace.

“Leo, what are you thinking about?” he asked me. I shook my head, smiling at his upturned face, so serious.

“Nothing. Only a fairy story.” I shrugged. “One of those old ones about England, but you probably won’t remember.”

“England?” he said. “Yes, I remember.”

“What, then?” I asked him.

“England was the place Grandmother used to tell us about. The explorers went into a different world and found it.”