Chapter 43: Maëlle – The Last Talk
Jaqueline’s house was one spacious room with a dirt floor covered with straw mats. The earthern walls were decorated with straw circles patterned in gold and blue, and there were lace curtains on the windows. Jaqueline first offered her bed to the Skeleton, who dismissed it, then to the Eslarian, who accepted it. She gathered cushions and pillows on the straw mats for herself and Maëlle. The Skeleton took the bench.
‘After twenty years sleeping on rock, this wood feels like a feather mattress.’
Jaqueline kept rubbing her eyes while she cried a cascade of tears. At some point in the last twenty years, she had accepted that her missing father was dead. If not, why didn’t he come home?
Anuré.
‘I didn’t know,’ she kept saying. ‘Why? Why?’
‘I was betrayed,’ said the Skeleton.
She kept asking, pressing, begging, but he said only:
‘Daughter, the only reason you are alive is because I kept my mouth shut.’
‘What will you do now?’ asked Maëlle.
The Skeleton lay on the bench and closed his eyes. Maëlle thought he would not answer, but he said:
‘Twenty years I lived in Anuré. It wasn’t hope that kept me alive nor was it the raw will to survive. It was hatred. I will leave as soon as I feel strong enough. I will find my revenge. I suggest you do the same.’
‘We don’t want revenge,’ said Maëlle.
‘Of course you do. We all do. That son of yours, Neville, he wants it, too.’
Maëlle lay on the mat Jaqueline had prepared for her. She was exhausted so she tried to sleep, but she got stuck between consciousness and dream, in memories that looked like nightmares. She tried not to think about it, but the last words she heard her husband say kept surfacing in her mind like a corpse in the tide. It was the day Neville left for Fabec.
‘We have killed him,’ said the legless captain. ‘I thought bushido was the answer. A philosophy from another world brought to us by Nakamura herself. The best we can do is die with honor but there goes our son to do exactly that, and I can’t stop thinking that it was us who killed him. He isn’t going to die with honor because it is the best he can do, but because it is all he’s got left.’
Maëlle, still hurting because of the son who had just departed, now noticed that her husband had saddled the donkey. Without his legs, it was difficult for him to ride a horse, but he had found a way to tie what was left of his legs to the mule and balance himself on the saddle.
‘Where are you going?’ asked Maëlle.
‘Fulion is right,’ he said. ‘Franária is mired in darkness. I can’t see anything. I have died, Neville is going to die and you think you’re alive, but you are wrong.’
Maëlle turned and tossed on the mat, trying to plunge into the place where dreams took over the sadness, but she ended up floating back to consciousness, remembering each sentence, each movement of her husband’s face during this last talk they had before he, too, left.
How wonderful was honor, the unbroken word, the integrity of promises kept. Bushido. Too wonderful for Franária, this wingless eagle. To be honorable wasn’t enough; to do nothing wrong wasn’t enough. You had to do what was right. Maëlle thought the revolution in Debur was doing what was right but it resulted in nothing, and it was her fault.
Maëlle went inside the Emerald. In all those years, she was the only person Henrique let in and she took a dagger in the drapes of her red skirt.
‘Finally, a friend,’ said Henrique on the day she went there to kill him.
She was wearing the same red skirt she wore on the day she talked to Henrique for the first time. It was also the first time the Captain of Baynard saw her.
‘The first thing I noticed about you was that red skirt,’ said her husband on their last talk. ‘You came into the hall for your audience with the king and you were wearing a long, red skirt and a white blouse.’
On that day, she made a speech to the king, petitioning for a library for Debur. When Maëlle came back to the Emerald to kill Henrique, she barely recognized him. His muscles had withered away, his blond mane had balded away, the mountain had become a mound.
‘Where is Olivier?’ he asked. ‘Where is my captain to read for me?’
In the past, Maëlle offered to teach Henrique how to read, but he had refused.
‘I have Olivier,’ he had said. ‘And now, thanks to you, my captain can read as well.’
‘Where are they?’ he asked again. ‘Where are my friends?’
‘Olivier is in Tuen, and he is not coming to help you. My husband can’t serve you any longer, remember? He lost his legs at the Bridge.’
‘Why...’ asked Henrique. ‘Why did he do that? He had everything here.’
‘A warrior that follows bushido wouldn’t be happy with simply being safe,’ said Maëlle. ‘He needs to evolve and fight for his honor if not for his king’s.’
‘My captain knew nothing of bushido before he met you, Maëlle. He couldn’t even read. He asked Olivier to teach him after he saw you here asking for funds to build a library.’
‘That’s not true,’ she said.
The captain was the first person to step into the library when it opened to the public. Maëlle saw him against the light, then he gradually became clearer as he walked into the shade.
‘Dapper,’ she thought. She had read that word in the morning and kept on wondering if anybody still used it nowadays. What kind of person would be described as dapper? That white man amidst desorganized books in shelves that smelled of new. He took a book about bushido. Maëlle didn’t know what that was and asked Fulion to bring more books on the subject. When the captain came back to the library, she had something to talk to him about.
‘He told me,’ said Henrique, ‘that he took the first book on the first shelf. He didn’t even see what it was about. All he wanted was to talk to the beautiful woman in the red skirt he had seen in the audience, but you were so enthusiastic about bushido that he read every single book about it just to have something to talk to you about.
The only reason Maëlle read about bushido was the dapper captain. Was she the reason he read about it, too? Did that mean that if he had taken a book about cooking, Neville would have become a cook? That instead of shaping his life by the principles of bushido, Neville would have philosophized about string beans and chick peas?
Maëlle took the dagger from her pocket but kept it hidden in the folds of her skirt.
‘My husband,’ she said.
‘He hates me.’
‘His legs.’
‘Olivier hates me, too. They don’t know what it means to be king.’
‘Am I supposed to pity you?’
The king was sitting in front of a naked rose bush. On the day Maëlle first came to the Emerald, there were roses everywhere. Henrique was the only king in Franária to finance a library. Thanks to the library she met her husband. Henrique had given her a life.
‘You can’t kill me,’ he said. ‘Nobody can, because I’m king. You don’t understand. Nobody does, not even Olivier. We have no power, nothing we do matters, we’re all mired in quicksand. You are all fighting against it but in truth, you’re sinking further. I think it likes it when we fight, just like that cat Leonard, the Accident, adopted. It must like playing with mice.’
‘It?’ asked Maëlle. ‘What is it?’
‘I don’t know, but I know what it wants. I see it clearly. No one else does. Maybe it’s because I’m King. In return for doing what it wants, I have flowers.’
‘What does it want you to do now?’
‘Nothing,’ said the king. ‘Nothing at all.’
If Maëlle had killed Henrique during that last talk, Neville might not now be chasing death in the shape of a dragon. Maëlle turned and tossed on her mat. Why hadn’t she killed Henrique? Why had she left without slicing his throat? Was it pity? Was it shame? Henrique had been, after all, a friend and also the man who gave her everything.
A moan tore her away from her memories, and she went to her companion in arms and in slavery. The Eslarian cried for Thaila in feverish nightmares. He kicked in his bed until he fell and had to be held by Maëlle and Jaqueline.
The Skeleton was silent. He ate in small bites, drank as much water as his stomach could take, forced his body to regain strength bit by bit. After seven days, the Skeleton felt strong enough to chase his revenge.
‘At least wait until the end of winter,’ begged Jaqueline.
He left in spite of her protests. She had given him a bag filled with water and food. Maëlle watched as the younger woman stood in front of the closed door, looking at it. Twenty years without her father; suddenly he was there, an undernourished, haggard, meatless vengeance. Did she want him back? There was no time to decide: he was gone again. Was it forever this time? Pain? Relief?
‘Thaila,’ said the Eslarian. This time he wasn’t delirious. ‘I need to find her.’
‘At least wait until the end of winter,’ whispered Jaqueline.
‘I can’t,’ said the Eslarian.
‘You’re weak,’ said Maëlle.
‘Please, let me go to Thaila.’
‘I’m coming with you,’ said Maëlle.
‘Don’t. You go back to Debur. It is possible that Vincent found her and rescued her from Olivier already. I’m going to Tuen. It is much closer and I should be able to get there on my own. In Debur or in Tuen, one of us will find her.’
And where is my son? thought Maëlle.
