Chapter 32: Robert – Life Without Neville
Tell him what? Robert wondered. So much time had passed since Neville left Debur that the memories got mixed in Robert’s head.
‘I think it all began with the pamphlets,’ he said.
‘Was it all of you?’ asked Neville.
All of you? There was no plural at the time. The pamphlets appeared, nobody knew from where. The king and Robert thought it was Maëlle, but Robert soon found out who it really was.
He didn’t tell Neville how he found that out. He didn’t speak of all those sleepless nights, of the times he went to the Eslarian’s bakery in the small hours just to look at the roof that sheltered Thaila as she slept. Neville would have laughed at him. Or maybe not. Neville never laughed at anyone, but Robert laughed at himself. Even if Neville didn’t find it ridiculous for a man to find comfort in looking at somebody’s roof, Robert was embarrassed of his unrequited love.
When Robert was a little orphan, he had dreams of rediscovering Sátiron. In his dreams, he found it in the middle of the Land of the Banished and, because Sátiron was the Land of the Impossible, it was him that Thaila loved there, not Neville.
Robert didn’t tell Neville about the light he saw inside the bakery’s window in the middle of the night, when bread and dough should be asleep. All he said was:
‘It was Thaila who made the first pamphlets.’
‘Tell me about the revolution,’ said Neville.
Robert told him. Slowly, as if each word was born at the base of his stomach and had to climb his esophagus to reach his throat. He spoke about the day Neville went away, leaving them all behind. Robert, Thaila, Maëlle. He spoke of Thaila’s pamphlets. He joined her when he found out and, together, they spread the truth in the streets of Debur.
‘Poison,’ murmured Neville.
It didn’t take long for Maëlle and the Eslarian to find out what Robert and Thaila were doing. The Eslarian rejected the whole thing and tried to make them stop, but Thaila had made up her mind. Maëlle never hesitated. Then the day came when that woman stood on a chair and people died in front of the Emerald. Henrique, always in the shadows, enlisted children, enlisted the Accident.
‘We didn’t mean for anyone to die,’ said Robert. ‘We only wanted Henrique to change, to act, to anything.’
Neville wasn’t surprised that his friends and family had started the revolution in Debur. In a way, he already knew it, but the darkness in the Mouth made the world out there superfluous. Debur had become a place that Neville could only reach in dreams or in death.
‘If you are here, it means you have been defeated,’ said Neville.
‘Olivier,’ said Robert. ‘He was on our side until now.’
‘Henrique and Olivier are friends,’ said Neville, but he was uncertain. To remember what existed outside the Mouth of War proved to be harder than Neville imagined.
‘And yet, during all those years of revolution, Olivier stayed in Tuen, leaving Henrique alone with us,’ said Robert.
Neville didn’t question Olivier’s actions. He remembered when the councilor revealed the king’s treason. Olivier wasn’t proud of serving Henrique. In the beginning, perhaps. After all, he was one of the first to lose a dear one to the king’s draw. Olivier’s wife’s death was an example to all the other soldiers. Henrique always spoke proudly of Olivier’s loyalty. What must it have felt like for the councilor to find out that the king wasn’t brave enough to fight the war?
‘We tried to kill Henrique,’ said Robert. ‘For a whole year all we did was try to assassinate him.’
There was a time when Neville would have frowned upon that. Nowadays it didn’t matter. In the Mouth of War there were only monsters and the dead. Neville didn’t see himself as a monster.
‘We couldn’t,’ said Robert. ‘I think there was some sort of power against us, some type of magic protecting the king.’
They couldn’t kill Henrique, just as Neville couldn’t kill Faust and Faust couldn’t kill Neville. Maybe Maëlle was right from the beginning and darkness had been leaking out of the Mouth for years, erasing colors, preventing the end of War. There was blood but never victory. Something hid in the valley and it had been discovered today. Neville shivered when he remembered that black wraith on the lips of War. Somehow he felt that the wraith knew what lived inside the valley.
‘Maëlle was the only one who got close enough to kill Henrique,’ said Robert, ‘but she came out of the Emerald with her hands clean. She never told us what happened in there. All I know is that Henrique lives on.’
Robert paused, then:
‘We need help. Thaila needs help.’
Neville showed no reaction.
‘What happened to you?’ asked Robert. ‘My body is weak and tired, but you are sick in the soul.’
‘The war,’ said Neville. ‘The War.’
‘It was Thaila who started the revolution. For you. Everything she did, she did for you.’ And everything I did was for her, he thought.
Neville searched the dusty attics of his mind and found Robert’s forlorn sighs, remembered the glares Robert sent his way when Thaila looked at Neville.
‘You loved her,’ said Neville. Funny how he never noticed it before, but it was so clear now. Funny how it felt that he was looking at somebody else’s life instead of remembering his own.
‘And she loved you but you never really saw her and she never really saw me. We’re some sort of unfinished poem.’
‘She must have forgotten me,’ said Neville. Just as I forgot her, he thought. Just as I forgot all of you.
‘We got married,’ said Robert.
Two years earlier they had a fight. It was something stupid, a misspelled word on a pamphlet, but they were tense like ropes that had been pulled too tight for too long and were ready to snap. On that day, Robert pointed at Thaila’s nose and said:
‘Five years and you still count the stars over the Mouth of War. Five years and you still don’t see me here. I’m still in Neville’s shadow.’
‘Five years and you don’t see yourself,’ said Thaila. ‘Five years and you still linger in his shadow.’
‘But you love him.’
‘He left, Robert.’
Robert dropped his hand on the pamphlet with the misspelled word.
‘You are here,’ she said and came closer until her toes touched his toes. ‘You are, aren’t you?’
‘I am here.’
‘Show me.’ But she didn’t give him time to show her anything. She stood on her toes and touched his lips with hers.
That was the first night they held each other. It wasn’t the way Robert had imagined it, feverish, hot, passionate, and wet. It was more like groping in the dark with your hands in front of you, trying not to break anything, stumbling on furniture. It was unknown and even scary. Robert couldn’t remember which word he had misspelled.
For two years they were together, but Robert was always aware that Thaila missed Neville more than she loved Robert. If she saw Neville again, she wouldn’t want Robert anymore. Even so, he came to Fabec. Even so, he said to Neville:
‘I need you. I can’t save her.’
‘Save her from what?’ asked Neville.
‘Olivier.’
‘The man without fangs,’ murmured Neville.
‘He never stopped wanting her.’ Thaila had told them about Olivier’s offer a few years earlier. ‘Olivier crushed our revolution so easily. Then he went to our home and took Thaila away. Just like that.’
‘You escaped,’ said Neville.
‘Leonard, the Accident, saved me. I believe he likes me because of the day when he was attacked on the street.’
Neville remembered that story. Vincent had said that, on the day the Accident was recruited, people tore off his clothes.
‘He was half naked and I lent him my coat,’ said Robert. ‘I think that is why he hid me.’
Leonard hid Robert in the orphanage where they grew up. Centuries ago, the orphanage was a factory. The orphans nested in the old machinery, fossilized devices, lifeless mechanisms, empty shells without sorcery. Leonard the Accident didn’t know his parents. The Accident’s mother died giving birth to him and nobody knew who his father was. The only link Leonard had with his antecessors was a large machine, round and hollow, made of red metal that rusted in blue and smelled of wet iron even though it was as dry as a desert.
Leonard slept inside that machine. No other child got near it, but Leonard knew, though nobody told him, that it was in that machine that his antecessor had his accident.
‘I think it made laces,’ Leonard told Robert. ‘I dream in lace, you know and they are transparent, like me.’
Robert never went near that machine. Things that were once moved by sorcery carried hollow echoes and seemed to steal something. Robert couldn’t tell what it was that these things stole or even if they really stole, but nobody liked the weeping, hungry echo of the sorcery-less machine. Nobody thought of searching for Robert in there.
‘Fulion took me out of Debur,’ he said. ‘She took me on paths no one else knows. In Deran, she took me to the road and pointed toward Fabec. Neville, you have to save Thaila.’
‘What happened to the Eslarian?’ asked Neville.
‘Olivier happened to all of us. He must have decided that Baynard couldn’t take much longer of an unresolved revolution. He must have decided that, if Henrique hadn’t fallen, then he was a better option than Fulbert of Patire. So he came to Debur and put an end to it.’
‘Did he kill the Eslarian?’
‘He sold them to Patire.’
‘Them?’
‘Your mother too.’
Robert was falling apart on the chair. His chin dropped to his chest, his neck seemed to have no bone. Neville pushed Robert’s forehead, to look into his old friend’s eyes. Those eyes didn’t focus on Neville but remained loose, drunk, helpless.
Neville had seen that same look in Fabec’s soldiers and also in Beloú’s soldiers. Once he crossed the Mouth to take a closer look at Sananssau and, though he couldn’t see their faces from the distance, the way those soldiers stood on the wall told him that they were the same. Robert, Thaila, Maëlle, and the Eslarian would normally not underestimate a man like Fangless Olivier. However, in the Mouth of War, the world often presented itself to Neville in the shape of a tunnel. It felt as though Neville’s mind was a funnel and the end of the funnel was a target. There Neville should go; there he must kill.
Or die.
It was his bow that always broke the walls of that tunnel. When the world became a tunnel, the black wood reflected like a black mirror. Neville saw his own eyes’ reflection and they were dilated, drunk. He took the bow to look closer. The moment he touched magic, the tunnel shattered and the world surrounded Neville again. The bow was back to normal.
Neville let go of Robert’s head and fetched the black bow. He asked Robert to show him his hands and gave him the bow. Robert jumped as though he had touched hot iron. He blinked in the light and stood up.
‘I was a fool,’ said Robert. ‘Olivier never stopped wanting Thaila. He must have come after her and that was how he found out we were leading the revolution. Because, Neville, when he came after Thaila, he said: “You should have chosen me.”’
Neville held Robert by the shoulders.
‘Wait for me here in Fabec,’ he said.
‘Are you leaving?’
‘I’m going to fetch the Eslarian and my mother.’
Slaves were taken to the mines of Anuré. They would have to wait in Lencon until the winter storms were over. Boats took Baynardian slaves to Lencon through the Loefern. Neville didn’t have access to the boats, but Lecoeurge had once told him that Rimbaud’s Caravan, when it didn’t cross Franária through Deran, took a bridge in the south.
‘Is there a bridge over the Loefern?’ Neville asked at the time. ‘Then why did my father want to build one to invade Patire?’
Before he replied, Lecoeurge folded his purple hat and put it away in a box.
‘The bridge I mention is in the Frontier.’ The clown’s voice dropped. ‘It crosses the Loefern where the Loefern meets the Blood. The caravan seldom camps there, only when we can’t leave Franária before the storms. I know that traveling during Franish winter is madness but the alternative, staying in the Frontier, is even more frightening. You can’t sleep. Cold is deeper there and the Land of the Banished has eyes. Sometimes something sniffs the back of my neck. I turn and there is nothing. Your father built that bridge, boy, because the Frontier is not an option. People don’t go there for a reason.’
‘Are you really going to Anuré?’ asked Robert. ‘In the middle of winter? I’m coming with you.’
‘Weak as you are, you’re going to hold me back.’ Neville opened the door and started giving orders. ‘Besides, they are most certainly still in Lencon.’
‘What about Thaila?’
‘I’ll send a man to Debur and one to Tuen.’
‘Aren’t you going to get her?’
Neville held the door with so much strength that the wood complained. He hated what he said next, but the truth was:
‘Thaila’s life is not in danger.’
