Chapter 15: Frederico – The Old Woman
Frederico wandered the streets of Beloú at night, flogged by nightmares. After three or four sleepless nights, he lay down in a corner of the royal mansion of Belóu. Then he kicked, cried, begged.
‘Stop. Please, stop.’
‘What do you dream of anyway?’ asked Faust.
‘A dog.’
‘Does it attack you? Kill it. Frederico, you have to defend yourself. I train with you every day, but you never pick up your sword outside the mansion. You need to dispense justice. I can’t rule this city and fight a war if you stop me from disciplining my soldiers.’
Frederico was crestfallen. Was he a burden to his brother? Since he moved to Beloú, Faust couldn’t punish his soldiers as he wished. Frederico thought the punishments were often unfair and way too frequent. He constantly intervened and convinced his brother to give them up. Frederico saw the hand of Fulbert in that cruelty, and he couldn’t bear to see his brother, who was a better man and a better ruler than Fulbert, lose the people’s respect because of attitudes that came from the king with an F.
Fool began with an F. King Fulbert of Fatire. Feces began with an F.
Frederico left the mansion and went down the badly kept streets to a square with a dry fountain in the middle. Beloú, he would learn from Vivianne, was a typical Franish city from before the empire. One of the few survivors from the Dark Age. Ironic, Frederico would think, to survive the Dark Age only to stand at the lips of War after the disappearance of the empire. Beloú had thicker walls than the cities built post-Dark Age, because the technology to build unbreakable but slim walls came from Sátiron. The houses of Beloú were built with a mixture of clay, rock, and sawdust, which resisted time but kept warmth out of the houses.
Winter in Beloú was mean. Inside the houses it was nearly as cold as outside, and there wasn’t wood enough to keep all those people warm. The soldiers took precedence. They needed to survive in order to die at the Mouth. The civilians burned whatever they could: boxes, paper, cattle feces.
In the mansion there were fireplaces. Not all of them had been converted. The royal mansion of Beloú had been built during the empire. Frederico knew that even before he met Vivianne, not only because the walls were thin and white, and the whole building was warmer than any other house in Beloú, even though it had larger windows, but also because of the unconverted fireplaces. Some wings of the mansion stayed closed. Faust had opted for a smaller space, more easily managed. He was the one who converted the fireplaces in the bedrooms, but he didn’t worry about the rest of the mansion.
When Frederico noticed that his brother needed space to rule in peace (Faust’s choice of words), he went up to the attic, which connected his room with one of the closed wings of the mansion. There, Frederico found mechanisms. Buttons, levers, lamps. He guessed what the lamps were for, but he couldn’t understand what a button or lever was meant to do. Did the lever open doors? Windows? Did the button fold the floor in two, and make a table appear from behind a wall?
The unconverted fireplaces he found in those wings had buttons and glass plates. How did you feed them wood, he wondered. And where did the smoke go? Faust had had to open space for chimneys when he converted the other fireplaces. The old, unconverted ones were just holes in the wall.
Frederico didn’t like to leave the mansion. Sometimes, when the nightmare tormented him and he wandered the nightly mists, something watched him from over Beloú’s wall.
In the beginning, Frederico thought it was just his imagination, that the nightmare had tainted the mist with darkness. But the days leaked on and, more and more, Frederico felt the weight of something watching him. Whatever it was, it didn’t like him. From the walls, poured spite and a kind of anger that reminded him of Fulbert of Patire. It made the hands in Frederico’s nightmare more real; the whites of the little dog’s eyes more painful, redder the veins, colder the skin.
It was a sunny day when Frederico thought of Fulbert and feces. The prince decided to get out of the mansion, trying not to sprain his ankles on the cobblestones bitten by time. Later, when Vivianne told him how old Beloú was, Frederico wondered if those were the original cobblestones that paved the streets at least seven hundred years ago. People in Beloú got used to hurting toes and turning ankles.
Frederico went to the square and was about to sit at the edge of the fried fountain when an old woman stumbled and fell, spreading books and manuscripts all over the square. Frederico helped the woman stand up and picked up all her papers.
‘Thank you, boy, thank you. I’ll reward you.’
‘I don’t need a reward.’
‘I’ll give it to you anyway.’
‘There’s no need.’
The old woman looked right inside his eyes.
‘It is extremely necessary,’ she said. The words were paused, like the calculated steps of a wolf nearing prey. The old woman’s wrinkles had a strange, bluish shadow, and she seemed to have more color than all of Beloú together.
Frederico raised his hands defensively.
‘I don’t want any reward.’
The wrinkles around the old woman’s eyes untangled, and the eyes widened a little, showing emotion. Was it pity?
‘Here,’ she offered him a piece of paper.
‘You are giving me a manuscript?’ Frederico asked, taking the piece of paper.
‘Not the document. The content.’
‘You are going to let me read it.’
‘Anyone can read it, boy. You, I will teach to understand. Go on, read it.’
‘I can’t.’
The old woman massaged her temples.
‘I suppose I’ll have to teach you how to read.’
‘It’s all right,’ said the prince. ‘I don’t want to.’
‘I do.’
‘So, you intend to teach me right here, in the middle of the street?’
‘I have a place,’ said the old woman.’
‘Where?’
‘Far from Beloú.’
If the old woman gave him shelter, Frederico thought, he wouldn’t be a burden to his brother anymore. He would also get rid of whatever it was that hated him in the Mouth of War. On the other hand, that looked a lot like a trap: the old woman’s insistence, the fact that she stumbled and fell right in front of him, but seemed rather unscathed. The colors — she had so many colors that the fountain, the city, every single cobblestone, and even the people seemed grey in comparison.
‘If you are looking to capture a prince of Patire, you are aiming for the wrong one,’ he said. ‘I’m only Frederico.’
‘Tell me, Only Frederico, how long has Franária been in war?’
‘About four hundred years.’
‘And for how long has the fighting been restricted to the Mouth of War?’
‘I’m not sure. Three hundred years?’
‘Nearly three hundred years of war caged in the Mouth,’ said the old woman, ‘until two years ago when Baynard tried to invade Patire outside the Mouth of War. The Bridge Battle should have been a massacre, the beginning of a new, bloody chapter of the Franish Civil War. Thanks to you, it ended with the death of a horse and two legs, nothing more. Ever since you moved to Beloú, Faust has not punished unjustly. You are wrong, Only Frederico. You are exactly the prince I’m looking for.’
‘Who are you?’
‘Go get your things, boy, and find a horse. I have taken residence in the Leoneren Forest.’
‘Leoneren is four days away.’
‘Three on my pace. Meet me here in half an hour.’
