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Entry tags:
the boy born into famine
Characters: Zenos yae Galvus; Solus zos Galvus
Warnings: Intimations of child abuse; discussions of canon-typical violence
Summary:
“Your Radiance,” says the soldier. He clinks like a fistful of coins while he salutes in his armor. Zenos rests his chin on his knees. The soldier clinked like a fistful of coins–or, Zenos decides, like a chain at the collar of a hound.
But none of the noises were what woke Zenos. It was only the floor, so cold against his palms, cold enough even to–well, it shocked him. He had been warm inside his dream–too warm, then hot–where aught and all was taken by flame, embers gusting by, one fleck stinging the crest of his cheek. He darted his hand up to the burning ash, to sweep it from his face, but there was the floor, so cold against his palms–well, it shocked him–
“What are you doing there?” asks the emperor.
Oh, the soldier has left by now.
Zenos does not answer and he does not move.
“Behind my seat,” says the emperor. Men speak this way when they are annoyed, Zenos knows, but then the emperor snorts–and Zenos knows men breathe this way when they almost laugh. “Huddled beyond the throne,” says the emperor.
Annoyed then almost laughing: it’s too like the hot ash and the cold floor, one disparate pulse after another, just confusing. Zenos cannot recall if he held any strong opinion of the emperor before this, but now he chooses to dislike him. And, seeing as Zenos doesn’t like the man, he feels no obligation to respond.
For his own silence, he can hear the emperor shifting upon the throne: silk and linen and their whispers, the sounds of imperious showmanship as he, too, clinks like a fistful of coins, and–nearly smothered by the emperor’s beard–a groan and hisses of pain. Then the emperor settles.
All of it only makes Zenos dislike him further. Zenos has never known the emperor well, but the stories claim that he’s a mighty man, not someone who settles in his throne to languish in the humdrum, the mundane. It’s all too dull, too slow, too much like cotton overwhelming his mind, and he resents the emperor for resigning himself to it.
“You’re committing a crime, you know,” remarks the emperor at last. Zenos lifts his chin from his knees to pay attention–only because he cannot tell whether the emperor is vexed or pleased in declaring this, and that’s a little interesting. The emperor even tells him, “You could be put to death for that.”
Zenos doesn’t expect to laugh in response to the emperor, but he finds himself doing it. It feels strange in his throat and it sounds strange to his own ears. The peal of it. The high pitch of it, cresting on his youth. It sounds like a pig.
An impertinent pig, at that. The emperor doesn’t appreciate it. “Find it funny, do you? Well won’t your mother be so sad when you have been executed.”
“She’s dead,” Zenos points out.
The emperor is silent. Then he exclaims, “That’s right. She died when you were just a little lump.”
“Yes.”
“Hmm.” The emperor is shifting on the throne again. Zenos can hear the silks and the silly clinks. “Well,” says the emperor, “your father, then.”
But Zenos denies it just by humming and shaking his head. He has none of the emperor’s jingling. “I don’t think he will mind if you execute me,” says Zenos, confident and quiet. “My father wishes that I would die. Or, at least, he would prefer it. It would be easier for him. So that would be all right.” He bears the voice of a boy. Not a mournful boy, not a sorry one. To acknowledge this, to live with the knowledge of this, does not scuff his knee nor cuff his chin. But he is unmistakably a child, and his voice comes from a body not half as big as it will be. He is unmistakably a child who cannot understand his father. From where he sits behind the throne, with his knees pulled up to his chest, he sounds like such a small boy.
The emperor hardly cares enough to even wave it off. “He may well.” His words are faint and inattentive, until– “It will be quite vexing to him if you do not.” In saying this, he sounds outright pleasant. Zenos realizes it only because he notices now that he has never heard it before. A pleasant voice. The emperor’s pleasant voice.
“Then I suppose you won’t execute me,” says Zenos.
“No,” says the emperor. “I suppose not.” He sighs at length, somehow leaden even on a breath, and Zenos recalls a novel he’d read, a passage about a hero traversing a wintry waste:
Yes, the emperor’s sigh sounds something like that.
Zenos doesn’t remark on this. He has never had anyone with whom to share his thoughts; there is no cause for him to guess he’s got one now.
“And you’ve nothing to say for yourself,” observes the emperor. He says it dryly as a snowless winter, that unseen brutality in the air. A chapped mouth, like to bleed. An imperceptible assault upon the skin. “What a boring boy.”
Zenos has ridden on hunts with the members of court. He has seen the stag and the moment the hunters catch its attention. Its discerning ears. The focus of its eyes. The interested shape of its body. How it knows to turn its head toward its hunters, poised as it does, no knocking of its knees, no tremor at its cheek. All motion and tension reserved for that turn of the head–and for the heart. Its pumping heart and how it heats the blood. A stag’s hot blood makes steam in the air if it is hunted and gutted in early morning. Zenos has seen this; he has ridden with courtiers to hunt at dawn. He has contemplated the steam, the heat, the pumping heart. But he cannot recognize the posture of the stag in himself right now. The only familiar thing–
“Boring?” he asks. He knows no other boys his age, so he cannot tell that he squirms in place like them just now.
“Yes, that’s what I said,” the emperor drones. “Are you dull of mind as the mouth?”
No one has spoken to Zenos this way. He is the interested shape of the stag, turning his head, feeling the thud of his heart. He is looking for the barrel of the gun.
He feels it. He feels it. For once, he really feels.
He flees from the throne room. The emperor does not contest it, nor does he send an executioner along to collect Zenos for judgment. They go back to ignoring each other.
–
A sennight on, the emperor asks, “What’s wrong with you?”
Zenos wakes up, curled against the side of the throne. He is surprised to find himself panting like a runner. Like a victim. He presses his hand flat to his breast. He is surprised to feel that his heart is pounding, like the feet of a beast in flight. Like prey. His heart is pounding. He has the notion that if his flesh and bones were thinner–or if his hand were stronger, if he could only push in through his own chest–he could grasp that pounding heart, the heart of prey, of a victim, of a runner.
He curls his fingers. They do not push in through his chest. So he breathes out and then rises up on his knees, just enough to peer over the arm of the throne. The emperor can only see Zenos’ three eyes; the rest of his face is still out of view.
“When I came in,” Zenos says, “as you slept, you were kicking your leg, like a dog.”
The emperor stares at him.
“Or a beetle on its back,” Zenos adds, with sudden inspiration.
“Drawn and quartered,” says the emperor. “That is what I’ll have done to you.” He watches Zenos sit down near his feet, how the boy huddles into his own lankiness. Zenos draws his knees to his chest, settles his chin atop them, and hugs around his legs. Then, with just his eyes, he looks up into the emperor’s face. The emperor looks back into his. It surprises Zenos: the emperor looks a lot. He looks more closely at Zenos’ eyes than Zenos ever has. Whatever it is the emperor sees, Zenos can tell he doesn’t like it. It does make Zenos wonder. He does wonder what must be wrong with him, when his great-grandfather looks at him that way.
Now the emperor glances askance. “I dreamed,” he says.
He says it, but Zenos does more than hear it. Zenos feels it in the way he has never felt anything before–in a way he did not know existed. A breadth and depth of feeling that is too much for the size of his body. It does more than envelop him, with him existing in it; it exists in him, reflecting off of all these bright places inside him, places he never imagined were there. The bright places he never imagined were there. It flashes through him–it resonates as if his body is a canyon and the emperor’s dream is a voice echoing all throughout him–and its absence after is a relief. He thinks that if he had to feel it for more than a moment, he would kill himself to be rid of it. And still he wants it for more than a moment. He wants the canyon, the gouge in the earth, the breadth and the depth. He wants the unbearable whole of it.
Zenos wonders if anyone else feels or has felt this. He wonders if he is alone.
He doesn’t realize that he is making the choice to share in something with the emperor when he says, “I also dreamed.”
“Did you, now?” The emperor sounds like the warm afternoons Zenos has spent watching ants march in a line. “My condolences; sounds like a bad one, to leave you so heaving, your precocious little self like a dog.”
Zenos sets his chin upon his knees. A bad dream. A bad dream. He tries saying it out loud. “A bad dream.” It’s rich in his mouth: substantial, somehow fertile. Something could take root here. It could multiply, become a bounty for harvest.
“You daft, precious thing,” the emperor says, but Zenos looks up at him again, because he has changed seasons: now he sounds like a young leaf, light green. There is the dampness; there is the thin flesh, a little translucent. A little tender. “What was so bad about it?”
“I don’t know,” says Zenos, honest as ever, himself not unlike the light green leaf: new and unassaulted. He hasn’t been eaten by pests. “What would be bad about a dream?”
The emperor considers his great-grandson. ‘Oh,’ thinks Zenos, ‘now I see.’ He recognizes the sight of himself in the emperor’s eye: he is the ant. He is marching with everyone else. It’s the first time anyone has made Zenos feel like he belongs in a single-file line. “How it feels,” says the emperor at last.
The unbearable whole of it?
–
In fact, Zenos has dreamed every night. He dreams yet again: it’s sweltering, but his flesh is frigid. Despite his hammering heart, the veins in his face run dry. He looks down at his hands–they are broad, a man’s hands, and they are shaking–and then he looks ahead to the fire and the fallen walls. How curious, now, this distant recognition that he may vomit. How curious, that the bile rises at the sight of the dying and the dead. He walks slowly, unhurried. The city burns slowly, unhurried. This is an ending that could last forever.
Zenos wakes up. He considers the dream.
How does it feel?
How does it feel?
How does it feel?
He touches his chest: fingertips first, then the flat of his hand. It feels like there is nothing behind the shelter of his rib cage. It feels like something has been taken away.
–
It’s late in the day when again he visits the emperor. Zenos has spent hours considering the dream and what the emperor said–how it feels. He has tried to decipher the emptiness. The absence. What used to be there. What was taken. He spends his history lessons thinking of loss. He spends calligraphy practice thinking of his stomach gone sour, just staggering nausea, at no more than the sight of blood on pavement. It enthralls him and he keeps touching his chest to make certain it’s still empty. No feeling has ever been so important to him as this emptiness, and he pursues the novelty with a gun in hand, with a sword in hand, with sharp teeth and a keen sense of smell. He must grasp his quarry. He needs to understand this profound nothingness. He needs to make sure it is real. So he comes to the emperor, who frowns at him.
Once, at a banquet, Zenos watched a woman feed her baby a bit of lemon. The baby screwed up its face in bewilderment and betrayal. It hated what it tasted. Yet when its mother offered it food from her hand again, it sucked on her fingers without wariness or a second thought.
Zenos thinks of that sometimes. It comes to his mind’s eye unbidden: the fatness of the baby’s face and how its mother liked thumbing its cheeks. It comes sometimes to the center of him, unbidden.
It’s not unbidden now to think of it, for the emperor himself is twisting up his face as if he’s been fed lemon. Zenos touches his palm to one cheek, then guides just two fingers to the corner of his mouth. He deliberates, then frowns. It’s a mighty frown, too mighty of one–exaggerated, as he tries to get it right, to understand it. “You always do this when you look at me,” he says, in greeting.
The emperor observes Zenos past the shade of his brow, down the length of his nose, its shape proud and lofty like a watchtower. “The look of you,” he says, “reminds me of a man I loved.” He watches while Zenos’ eyebrows raise a tick and then draw back down and toward each other in thought. “Yes,” he says. “Like that. Oh, everyone loved him.”
Zenos has not moved his eyes at all. They’re dry, and he is faintly aware that this is because he’s not looked at anything this hard or for this long since–he doesn’t know when. But he is looking hard and long. “Did they really?”
“They did,” says the emperor.
Such a superlative love just doesn’t make sense. “My father, too?” Zenos asks. He’s uncommonly stern, only because it’s hard for him to conceptualize what his father is like when he loves something. The look of him, the sound of him–Zenos cannot work it out in his mind.
But the emperor tells him, with ease and without care, “Yes, very much.”
Curious, Zenos runs his fingers across his own cheek, smooth without the put-on frown. He can’t imagine what there is to love about it. The shape of a man does not, on its own, seem worth the trouble of love. This feels like a different type of novel, now. This is a mystery. Zenos asks, as if he’s trying to puzzle out the villain: “Does that make you love me?”
The emperor doesn’t miss a beat. “No.” His voice is too thin to bear malice; there’s no room for anything but being tired.
But he did bear that deep frown. Zenos thinks of how unpleasant it feels to make. It takes energy. It takes the deliberate twisting of one’s own mouth. Then… “Does it make you hate me?”
“No, no.” He bats his hand with put-upon impatience. “I am kinder than that: I’ve no care about it either way.”
Kinder? Is it an act of kindness, then, to harbor no hatred for Zenos? Is it an aberration? He thinks of silence, and how its tide rises when he walks through the palace halls. He’s still touching his cheek, and he wonders if its shape matters so much more than the rest of him. “Do you think it makes my father hate me?”
“Perhaps. He was always…” The emperor snorts into his beard. Zenos is unfamiliar with dry, wry laughter, so he doesn’t recognize it as that. It sounds to him only like spite at most, and the dustiness of absence otherwise. “Sensitive about that sort of thing.”
“Would it be different, do you think…” Zenos pauses. There are his eyebrows, still drawn in. Their gold shines almost as dull platinum in the cold light about the throne. He is thoughtful. He isn’t mourning potential; he just wants to know if it ever existed. “If I had another face?”
He thinks of the fat baby and its mother touching its cheeks.
The emperor yawns. He can derive nothing more from this conversation than the dropping of his eyelids, and he waves his great-grandson away. “I really couldn’t tell you. You ought to ask him yourself.”
That’s all right. Zenos has gotten what he came for. He can tell: this is the sensation of loss. This is how it feels to go without. It’s not quite like what he feels when he dreams–he’s not even certain that it hurts–but it’s real. The emptiness is real.
–
The dreams continue unabated. The dream does. Each night he is set upon that same course of fire and ruin. Zenos dreams that dream and none else, and nothing about it changes.
He takes it upon himself, then, to deviate. First he savors the course, stopping to bask in the sights and sounds and even the taste in the air, all the copper and the sulfur. He takes the path to ruin with unhurried steps. Later, he changes course, winding around rubble, weaving around the dead. He just wants to see it a little more. He just wants to feel it–just a little more.
He walks and walks. He never reaches the end of the end; he always wakes up first. How much farther can there be?
–
It’s strange: now Zenos thinks often of the emperor. He finds himself wondering what the emperor might be doing in the morning, in the afternoon. Is the old man sleeping on his chair? What else does he do with his time? The thoughts are fleeting but more colorful than any others. Zenos tries to imagine it–he can even picture the emperor’s face. How’s that for new? When has a man’s face been anything to Zenos but silt falling to the bottom of a riverbed?
It is the emptiness, Zenos is sure. Now that he knows what it feels like, he sees it in the emperor’s eyes, in the shape of his mouth, the shadow of his brow: the emperor knows what it feels like, too. The emperor may claim that Zenos resembles someone’s beloved corpse, but Zenos wouldn’t know anything about that. He’s not familiar with anyone, and no one is familiar with him. Not until now–not until the emperor, the emptiness, and the throne room. Zenos has not once before left a lingering presence; he has only been solid, the weight of his footsteps, the form of his penmanship, the clacking of his practice sword. Never a thought for the sake of it. Never a boy for the sake of it.
But the emperor was thinking about him, too. The emperor has a question for him as soon as Zenos comes to him. Zenos approaches the throne, drawn–impossibly–toward the emperor who is drawn toward him in turn. This pull between them, be it of blood or the barren halls of their hearts, sees the emperor leaning forward on his throne, as if to hear the answer half an instant sooner. “Well? Did you ask him?”
Zenos flutters his eyelashes over the allegedly dead color of his eyes. “What do you mean?”
“Your father, boy. You and I brewed an inquiry of him, and I won’t have you fobbing me off. Did you ask your father if he hates the way you look?”
They brewed it together. Zenos rocks back on his heels with the antsiness of other boys his age. “Oh. I did.”
“And what did he tell you?” The emperor taps his fingers on the arm of the throne, and Zenos watches because of how it sounds–the thought is compulsive: like a bloodhound’s claws clicking through its loping gait–until the emperor snaps his fingers quickly to get the boy’s attention. “Come, now, be forthright or I’ll have no more of you.”
Nothing in Zenos’ face or posture says that it bothers him to hear this, but it must bother him enough that he obliges. “He told me nothing. He waved someone over to take me away. I haven’t seen him since.”
The emperor leans back in his seat, nodding to himself, satisfied. “I would wager that’s a tender yes.”
Just past the emperor’s beard, his bottom lip does something in particular, and it gleams. “You like it,” Zenos observes. “You’re pleased. When my father is troubled, you almost smile. I can see the spit on your teeth.”
The emperor wrinkles his nose. The unhappy curl of his lip etches through his white beard. Ah, there is the glisten–the spit–but displeased, now. “Don’t mind my teeth,” says the emperor. “And don’t mind your father’s troubles, either. What do they matter to you? He is already who and what he is, and his unhappiness has made him that way.” He scoffs, or laughs, or just coughs into his beard; hard to tell. “Come to think of it, it has really done the same for you. Whatever you would have been without your sire’s woes was starved out and stillborn and long since decayed.”
“I don’t mind them.” Zenos says it faintly, half-withdrawn from the statement for how little it matters. He is instead preoccupied with the spit–with the teeth–with the emperor’s smile and the lack of it. “Your teeth are like a rodent’s since you’re old. So I notice when you’re pleased.”
“This creature wants to be shot,” mutters the emperor.
Zenos pays it no heed. “What about me was stillborn? I’m alive, right here.”
“Are you?” says the emperor. He is dry in the way of chapped lips: the sudden taste of blood, then the belated prickle, the sting. But the blood is sluggish in moving from the lip to the tongue.
The flavor is delectable.
“Aren’t I?” Zenos asks. He is leaning in toward his great-grandsire like a boy enthralled by a faerie tale.
The emperor snorts. “Not by my reckoning. I suppose no one has bothered to tell you, but I would presume it to be clear: you were born during a season of famine. By the time you wriggled out of your mother’s body, there was no more love to feed you. And if you have starved since infancy, will that not have killed you? Will that not have killed what you would have been?”
He sounds like sudden blood, the lip to the tongue, and the flavor is delectable.
“What would I have been?” Zenos asks.
The emperor turns his gaze onto Zenos’ face–the fullness of his gaze, the volume of it, no different than water in the lungs. Zenos sees the color of his eyes more clearly than ever before. Scrying into the emperor’s irises isn’t like seeing a man naked, for Zenos has no such associations of furtive awe with flesh. This is beyond the flesh–perhaps beneath it–an intimacy too deep and tangible, as if his great-grandsire has reached into his belly and now accounts for everything inside of Zenos by counting with his fingers. It’s more circumspect than the gutting of game, but it is no less an inspection of what he contains. Zenos has never been looked at in this way, and he could believe that his great-grandfather’s hand is rearranging something inside him.
“Nothing much,” says the emperor. He sounds disappointed.
–
Most mornings, Zenos sits at a table big enough to seat twelve and eats his breakfast in silence. He eats it alone. Then, by the eighth bell, he must meet with his tutor of literature. The route from the dining room to the library is the same each time, so he walks it. Again and again and again. For how long? For how much longer?
Come to think of it, being awake sounds just like being in the dream. The same path is presented to him, and he is naturally expected to take it. What would he replace it with? What else does he have? So he walks the path. But with the dream–well, he realized that he could do something else. Couldn’t he now?
This morning, he does. He leaves the dining room and takes twenty-five paces down the corridor. Then he stops. He’s supposed to go straight. He’s supposed to go to the library. He turns left, down a different hall.
Zenos arrives at the throne room in time to see a soldier shouldering his way through the great doors. The soldier exits in a saunter, barely sparing Zenos a glance, put out about something or other. Zenos puts his hand flat against one of the doors. He rests for just a moment. Then he pushes against the door so he can peer into the room. There is the throne. Zenos lets himself inside, and breaks the law by trotting right up to the seat of imperial power.
Not halfway through the morning, and the emperor is asleep. It’s not surprising to see him asleep, but Zenos thinks now that neither has he paid much attention to it before this. He looks closely at the emperor. He sees a beard that’s spent years growing over a face that’s spent years frowning. He sees sloped shoulders without the strength to lift the head atop them, to lift the crown. He sees hands that shake as if it’s bitter winter, and he sees sweat upon a mottled brow. Exhaustion. That’s what Zenos sees. No reprieve in slumber. Just more and more and more of the same.
It’s that way for Zenos as well: more of the same. Slumber but not reprieve. Then does he look like this when he sleeps, too? Would he hang his head if he sat in this chair?
He sits, instead, beside it. He presses his whole side up against it and rests his cheek on its arm. His head is not close enough to touch his great-grandsire’s fingers–but close to them. Close to them. Zenos closes his eyes and thinks. He feels.
It’s a while before the emperor wakes. Zenos can hear it when it happens: the sighs, the straining, the disappointment. The emperor does not like to rouse. Zenos wants to hear him do it again. It seems naked compared to his other expressions of displeasure. The frank misery of it is like a mineral just hewn from the earth, covered in dust and debris, unfit for any lapidarist’s hand. It is pure. It’s like an ugly secret, not for sale or display. Not to be acknowledged.
Eventually, the emperor gets his bearings. He shifts around, looks around. There’s the glorious golden top of his son’s head–no, no, another boy’s–and he sets his palm atop it as if he is, himself, an aureole. After a moment, he takes it away.
Zenos lifts one hand out of his lap and touches his own hair. “Are you going to do that again?” he asks. It’s a strange question and he knows it, but that doesn’t matter to him. What matters is that he had not known that someone could–would ever–touch him that way, and now he urgently desires to know whether it could–might ever–happen again.
“No,” says the emperor. “I don’t think I will. What are you doing here? Haven’t you got something princely to do?”
“If lessons are princely,” Zenos says, “then I have got that.”
“Yet I see you’re not in attendance.” The emperor clucks his tongue, lofty–no, aerial. Not high up, but lighthearted. “Varis, your boy is a delinquent…”
“I don’t think he minds,” says Zenos, though it’s more like a question than anything else.
“Hm, hm, hm. No, it will encroach upon his pride. He resents that sort of thing. Well, ‘tis only mine opinion.” The emperor settles, then sits up straighter, clinking once more like coins. “Here–we could make a bet of it. If he should strike you in anger, you’ll owe me.”
“All right,” says Zenos. “But he never strikes me.”
“Never?”
“We’re not together enough for that.”
“Ah.” At first, Zenos thinks the emperor is again disappointed–but maybe he is thoughtful, on closer inspection. “Your lessons, then. What have you skipped to come and pester me?”
As if the thought is a hound nosing into his hand, Zenos remembers: the emperor won’t touch his head again. He takes his cheek from the arm of the throne and sets his chin on his knees. His blue eyes remain raised to His Radiance “Literature.”
“Skipping out on literature! Oh dear.” The emperor sounds like–Zenos has trouble with this one–oh, like a honey bun: thick and rich, sticky, dripping with sweets–but it isn’t sweet. It is rancid scorn. “A boy with no love for prose and poetry in my palace… You know, I’ve been most gracious and forgiving of your slights, but for this, I ought to do away with you.”
A wave breaks. Zenos didn’t know it was cresting in the first place, but now it crashes. “You’re wrong.” He has reared away from the throne, skittering back with his shoulders hiked high, and he can feel himself frowning. His face might be shaped like a serpent’s. “I read by myself. That is what I want to do. When the tutors tell me what to read, or when they read to me, it’s boring.” He thinks again–it seems like madness even to him–he thinks of the mother putting that piece of lemon into her baby’s mouth. The betrayal. The emperor is wrong about him. “And I hate them for boring me. If I could sew their mouths shut, I would do that.”
The wave broke. There was the foam, the waters all churning. But now the churning subsides, the waters recede, and there is just the shore with Zenos left bewildered upon it.
The emperor laughs at him. “Can’t you?” he says.
The churning subsides. There is just the shore. Zenos blinks, his blue eyes like water going calm, no violent tide. He wants to sew their mouths shut. He never thought about whether he could or could not.
“And so what is it you like to read?” the emperor asks. He’s smiling. There is the spit on his teeth, the shine Zenos sees when the emperor is spiteful about Zenos’ father. “What would keep you from being bored?”
“I…” This is no longer the betrayal on the baby’s fat face. It’s the bewilderment. “I read a book of poetry the other day… penned by Seneca cen Balbus. He begged leave to travel with an Imperial legion, and he wrote about what he saw. The landscapes.”
“That he did,” says the emperor, and his voice is not sweltering, it’s not the fire of dreams–but Zenos feels that it is warm. “Why, I didn’t take you for the type to admire an impulsive artist’s nature walks.”
Zenos feels like the poet, now: the new steps, the sight of the horizon. “It’s the novelty he described,” he says. “The newness. Other places. He wrote about what he was beginning to understand.”
The man and the boy are staring at each other. Zenos looks his age; there is something impossible about the emperor. “That he did,” the emperor says again. He clears his throat to recite.
“Yes,” says Zenos. “I’ve read that one…” How many times? “I have read that one.”
“Do you understand it?” asks the emperor.
“I’ve read it,” Zenos says.
The emperor is smiling, like he’s being mean. He’s smiling like he would smile at Zenos’ father. “Do you want to understand it?”
“I want to read it again,” Zenos says.
“Come here,” says the emperor. Zenos does it. He stays low to the ground, shuffle-crawling like a child, just a yalm back to the throne. The emperor lied to him: he reaches over the arm of the throne and sets his hand, again, at the top of Zenos’ head. “Do you understand at all? Why is it that you come here to while away the quiet hours with a tired old man?”
For the feeling; for the emptiness. For the lack of droning flies. Zenos opens his mouth before he works out how to word any of it. “I like the way your voice sounds.”
The emperor strokes his hair. “Oh?”
“It makes me want to fall asleep.” Then will come the unchanging dream.
The emperor’s thumb brushes over the golden inheritance of his great-grandson’s hair. He laughs into his beard. “So you come to me for lullabies. You really have got a starving little heart.”
Zenos doesn’t answer that. He might not have heard it. He continues, “You sound like you are dying.”
When the emperor laughs this time, it’s hardly a breath, more of a sticky wheeze. The length of his thumbnail touches the downy hair at Zenos’ temple, and he presses the edge against that young skin, a little hard–a little harder. “Not quite yet, I imagine. Not just yet.”
Zenos does not notice. He is enchanted with his own revelation; he has finally figured out how to articulate it. At last, he knows what it means, what he hears, what soothes him to sleep. And he might understand the sonnet, now, too. He speaks like he’s dreaming–the heat, the chill, the end, unchanging–when he says, “You sound like you are already dead.”
Warnings: Intimations of child abuse; discussions of canon-typical violence
Summary:
The emperor observes Zenos past the shade of his brow, down the length of his nose, its shape proud and lofty like a watchtower. “The look of you,” he says, “reminds me of a man I loved.” He watches while Zenos’ eyebrows raise a tick and then draw back down and toward each other in thought. “Yes,” he says. “Like that. Oh, everyone loved him.”
Zenos has not moved his eyes at all. They’re dry, and he is faintly aware that this is because he’s not looked at anything this hard or for this long since–he doesn’t know when. But he is looking hard and long. “Did they really?”
“They did,” says the emperor.
Such a superlative love just doesn’t make sense. “My father, too?” Zenos asks. He’s uncommonly stern, only because it’s hard for him to conceptualize what his father is like when he loves something. The look of him, the sound of him–Zenos cannot work it out in his mind.
But the emperor tells him, with ease and without care, “Yes, very much.”
the boy born into famine
“Your Radiance,” says the soldier. He clinks like a fistful of coins while he salutes in his armor. Zenos rests his chin on his knees. The soldier clinked like a fistful of coins–or, Zenos decides, like a chain at the collar of a hound.
But none of the noises were what woke Zenos. It was only the floor, so cold against his palms, cold enough even to–well, it shocked him. He had been warm inside his dream–too warm, then hot–where aught and all was taken by flame, embers gusting by, one fleck stinging the crest of his cheek. He darted his hand up to the burning ash, to sweep it from his face, but there was the floor, so cold against his palms–well, it shocked him–
“What are you doing there?” asks the emperor.
Oh, the soldier has left by now.
Zenos does not answer and he does not move.
“Behind my seat,” says the emperor. Men speak this way when they are annoyed, Zenos knows, but then the emperor snorts–and Zenos knows men breathe this way when they almost laugh. “Huddled beyond the throne,” says the emperor.
Annoyed then almost laughing: it’s too like the hot ash and the cold floor, one disparate pulse after another, just confusing. Zenos cannot recall if he held any strong opinion of the emperor before this, but now he chooses to dislike him. And, seeing as Zenos doesn’t like the man, he feels no obligation to respond.
For his own silence, he can hear the emperor shifting upon the throne: silk and linen and their whispers, the sounds of imperious showmanship as he, too, clinks like a fistful of coins, and–nearly smothered by the emperor’s beard–a groan and hisses of pain. Then the emperor settles.
All of it only makes Zenos dislike him further. Zenos has never known the emperor well, but the stories claim that he’s a mighty man, not someone who settles in his throne to languish in the humdrum, the mundane. It’s all too dull, too slow, too much like cotton overwhelming his mind, and he resents the emperor for resigning himself to it.
“You’re committing a crime, you know,” remarks the emperor at last. Zenos lifts his chin from his knees to pay attention–only because he cannot tell whether the emperor is vexed or pleased in declaring this, and that’s a little interesting. The emperor even tells him, “You could be put to death for that.”
Zenos doesn’t expect to laugh in response to the emperor, but he finds himself doing it. It feels strange in his throat and it sounds strange to his own ears. The peal of it. The high pitch of it, cresting on his youth. It sounds like a pig.
An impertinent pig, at that. The emperor doesn’t appreciate it. “Find it funny, do you? Well won’t your mother be so sad when you have been executed.”
“She’s dead,” Zenos points out.
The emperor is silent. Then he exclaims, “That’s right. She died when you were just a little lump.”
“Yes.”
“Hmm.” The emperor is shifting on the throne again. Zenos can hear the silks and the silly clinks. “Well,” says the emperor, “your father, then.”
But Zenos denies it just by humming and shaking his head. He has none of the emperor’s jingling. “I don’t think he will mind if you execute me,” says Zenos, confident and quiet. “My father wishes that I would die. Or, at least, he would prefer it. It would be easier for him. So that would be all right.” He bears the voice of a boy. Not a mournful boy, not a sorry one. To acknowledge this, to live with the knowledge of this, does not scuff his knee nor cuff his chin. But he is unmistakably a child, and his voice comes from a body not half as big as it will be. He is unmistakably a child who cannot understand his father. From where he sits behind the throne, with his knees pulled up to his chest, he sounds like such a small boy.
The emperor hardly cares enough to even wave it off. “He may well.” His words are faint and inattentive, until– “It will be quite vexing to him if you do not.” In saying this, he sounds outright pleasant. Zenos realizes it only because he notices now that he has never heard it before. A pleasant voice. The emperor’s pleasant voice.
“Then I suppose you won’t execute me,” says Zenos.
“No,” says the emperor. “I suppose not.” He sighs at length, somehow leaden even on a breath, and Zenos recalls a novel he’d read, a passage about a hero traversing a wintry waste:
The glacier had held its shape for an age–mayhap two ages, by the thickness of it–but it was tired, too tired to remain what it had been. Its age gave it weight, which in turn became a burden. And no shoulder can shoulder a burden eternal; all burdens must succumb to the laws of nature. This shelf of ice had been too great and too cold for too long. It was time for it to break.
It did so with the creaking of the ancients, with shrieking sourced from the youth of the star, but most of all with a sigh. That was the first he knew of the glacier breaking. He heard it sigh before he saw it come apart.
It did so with the creaking of the ancients, with shrieking sourced from the youth of the star, but most of all with a sigh. That was the first he knew of the glacier breaking. He heard it sigh before he saw it come apart.
Yes, the emperor’s sigh sounds something like that.
Zenos doesn’t remark on this. He has never had anyone with whom to share his thoughts; there is no cause for him to guess he’s got one now.
“And you’ve nothing to say for yourself,” observes the emperor. He says it dryly as a snowless winter, that unseen brutality in the air. A chapped mouth, like to bleed. An imperceptible assault upon the skin. “What a boring boy.”
Zenos has ridden on hunts with the members of court. He has seen the stag and the moment the hunters catch its attention. Its discerning ears. The focus of its eyes. The interested shape of its body. How it knows to turn its head toward its hunters, poised as it does, no knocking of its knees, no tremor at its cheek. All motion and tension reserved for that turn of the head–and for the heart. Its pumping heart and how it heats the blood. A stag’s hot blood makes steam in the air if it is hunted and gutted in early morning. Zenos has seen this; he has ridden with courtiers to hunt at dawn. He has contemplated the steam, the heat, the pumping heart. But he cannot recognize the posture of the stag in himself right now. The only familiar thing–
“Boring?” he asks. He knows no other boys his age, so he cannot tell that he squirms in place like them just now.
“Yes, that’s what I said,” the emperor drones. “Are you dull of mind as the mouth?”
No one has spoken to Zenos this way. He is the interested shape of the stag, turning his head, feeling the thud of his heart. He is looking for the barrel of the gun.
He feels it. He feels it. For once, he really feels.
He flees from the throne room. The emperor does not contest it, nor does he send an executioner along to collect Zenos for judgment. They go back to ignoring each other.
–
A sennight on, the emperor asks, “What’s wrong with you?”
Zenos wakes up, curled against the side of the throne. He is surprised to find himself panting like a runner. Like a victim. He presses his hand flat to his breast. He is surprised to feel that his heart is pounding, like the feet of a beast in flight. Like prey. His heart is pounding. He has the notion that if his flesh and bones were thinner–or if his hand were stronger, if he could only push in through his own chest–he could grasp that pounding heart, the heart of prey, of a victim, of a runner.
He curls his fingers. They do not push in through his chest. So he breathes out and then rises up on his knees, just enough to peer over the arm of the throne. The emperor can only see Zenos’ three eyes; the rest of his face is still out of view.
“When I came in,” Zenos says, “as you slept, you were kicking your leg, like a dog.”
The emperor stares at him.
“Or a beetle on its back,” Zenos adds, with sudden inspiration.
“Drawn and quartered,” says the emperor. “That is what I’ll have done to you.” He watches Zenos sit down near his feet, how the boy huddles into his own lankiness. Zenos draws his knees to his chest, settles his chin atop them, and hugs around his legs. Then, with just his eyes, he looks up into the emperor’s face. The emperor looks back into his. It surprises Zenos: the emperor looks a lot. He looks more closely at Zenos’ eyes than Zenos ever has. Whatever it is the emperor sees, Zenos can tell he doesn’t like it. It does make Zenos wonder. He does wonder what must be wrong with him, when his great-grandfather looks at him that way.
Now the emperor glances askance. “I dreamed,” he says.
He says it, but Zenos does more than hear it. Zenos feels it in the way he has never felt anything before–in a way he did not know existed. A breadth and depth of feeling that is too much for the size of his body. It does more than envelop him, with him existing in it; it exists in him, reflecting off of all these bright places inside him, places he never imagined were there. The bright places he never imagined were there. It flashes through him–it resonates as if his body is a canyon and the emperor’s dream is a voice echoing all throughout him–and its absence after is a relief. He thinks that if he had to feel it for more than a moment, he would kill himself to be rid of it. And still he wants it for more than a moment. He wants the canyon, the gouge in the earth, the breadth and the depth. He wants the unbearable whole of it.
Zenos wonders if anyone else feels or has felt this. He wonders if he is alone.
He doesn’t realize that he is making the choice to share in something with the emperor when he says, “I also dreamed.”
“Did you, now?” The emperor sounds like the warm afternoons Zenos has spent watching ants march in a line. “My condolences; sounds like a bad one, to leave you so heaving, your precocious little self like a dog.”
Zenos sets his chin upon his knees. A bad dream. A bad dream. He tries saying it out loud. “A bad dream.” It’s rich in his mouth: substantial, somehow fertile. Something could take root here. It could multiply, become a bounty for harvest.
“You daft, precious thing,” the emperor says, but Zenos looks up at him again, because he has changed seasons: now he sounds like a young leaf, light green. There is the dampness; there is the thin flesh, a little translucent. A little tender. “What was so bad about it?”
“I don’t know,” says Zenos, honest as ever, himself not unlike the light green leaf: new and unassaulted. He hasn’t been eaten by pests. “What would be bad about a dream?”
The emperor considers his great-grandson. ‘Oh,’ thinks Zenos, ‘now I see.’ He recognizes the sight of himself in the emperor’s eye: he is the ant. He is marching with everyone else. It’s the first time anyone has made Zenos feel like he belongs in a single-file line. “How it feels,” says the emperor at last.
The unbearable whole of it?
–
In fact, Zenos has dreamed every night. He dreams yet again: it’s sweltering, but his flesh is frigid. Despite his hammering heart, the veins in his face run dry. He looks down at his hands–they are broad, a man’s hands, and they are shaking–and then he looks ahead to the fire and the fallen walls. How curious, now, this distant recognition that he may vomit. How curious, that the bile rises at the sight of the dying and the dead. He walks slowly, unhurried. The city burns slowly, unhurried. This is an ending that could last forever.
Zenos wakes up. He considers the dream.
How does it feel?
How does it feel?
How does it feel?
He touches his chest: fingertips first, then the flat of his hand. It feels like there is nothing behind the shelter of his rib cage. It feels like something has been taken away.
–
It’s late in the day when again he visits the emperor. Zenos has spent hours considering the dream and what the emperor said–how it feels. He has tried to decipher the emptiness. The absence. What used to be there. What was taken. He spends his history lessons thinking of loss. He spends calligraphy practice thinking of his stomach gone sour, just staggering nausea, at no more than the sight of blood on pavement. It enthralls him and he keeps touching his chest to make certain it’s still empty. No feeling has ever been so important to him as this emptiness, and he pursues the novelty with a gun in hand, with a sword in hand, with sharp teeth and a keen sense of smell. He must grasp his quarry. He needs to understand this profound nothingness. He needs to make sure it is real. So he comes to the emperor, who frowns at him.
Once, at a banquet, Zenos watched a woman feed her baby a bit of lemon. The baby screwed up its face in bewilderment and betrayal. It hated what it tasted. Yet when its mother offered it food from her hand again, it sucked on her fingers without wariness or a second thought.
Zenos thinks of that sometimes. It comes to his mind’s eye unbidden: the fatness of the baby’s face and how its mother liked thumbing its cheeks. It comes sometimes to the center of him, unbidden.
It’s not unbidden now to think of it, for the emperor himself is twisting up his face as if he’s been fed lemon. Zenos touches his palm to one cheek, then guides just two fingers to the corner of his mouth. He deliberates, then frowns. It’s a mighty frown, too mighty of one–exaggerated, as he tries to get it right, to understand it. “You always do this when you look at me,” he says, in greeting.
The emperor observes Zenos past the shade of his brow, down the length of his nose, its shape proud and lofty like a watchtower. “The look of you,” he says, “reminds me of a man I loved.” He watches while Zenos’ eyebrows raise a tick and then draw back down and toward each other in thought. “Yes,” he says. “Like that. Oh, everyone loved him.”
Zenos has not moved his eyes at all. They’re dry, and he is faintly aware that this is because he’s not looked at anything this hard or for this long since–he doesn’t know when. But he is looking hard and long. “Did they really?”
“They did,” says the emperor.
Such a superlative love just doesn’t make sense. “My father, too?” Zenos asks. He’s uncommonly stern, only because it’s hard for him to conceptualize what his father is like when he loves something. The look of him, the sound of him–Zenos cannot work it out in his mind.
But the emperor tells him, with ease and without care, “Yes, very much.”
Curious, Zenos runs his fingers across his own cheek, smooth without the put-on frown. He can’t imagine what there is to love about it. The shape of a man does not, on its own, seem worth the trouble of love. This feels like a different type of novel, now. This is a mystery. Zenos asks, as if he’s trying to puzzle out the villain: “Does that make you love me?”
The emperor doesn’t miss a beat. “No.” His voice is too thin to bear malice; there’s no room for anything but being tired.
But he did bear that deep frown. Zenos thinks of how unpleasant it feels to make. It takes energy. It takes the deliberate twisting of one’s own mouth. Then… “Does it make you hate me?”
“No, no.” He bats his hand with put-upon impatience. “I am kinder than that: I’ve no care about it either way.”
Kinder? Is it an act of kindness, then, to harbor no hatred for Zenos? Is it an aberration? He thinks of silence, and how its tide rises when he walks through the palace halls. He’s still touching his cheek, and he wonders if its shape matters so much more than the rest of him. “Do you think it makes my father hate me?”
“Perhaps. He was always…” The emperor snorts into his beard. Zenos is unfamiliar with dry, wry laughter, so he doesn’t recognize it as that. It sounds to him only like spite at most, and the dustiness of absence otherwise. “Sensitive about that sort of thing.”
“Would it be different, do you think…” Zenos pauses. There are his eyebrows, still drawn in. Their gold shines almost as dull platinum in the cold light about the throne. He is thoughtful. He isn’t mourning potential; he just wants to know if it ever existed. “If I had another face?”
He thinks of the fat baby and its mother touching its cheeks.
The emperor yawns. He can derive nothing more from this conversation than the dropping of his eyelids, and he waves his great-grandson away. “I really couldn’t tell you. You ought to ask him yourself.”
That’s all right. Zenos has gotten what he came for. He can tell: this is the sensation of loss. This is how it feels to go without. It’s not quite like what he feels when he dreams–he’s not even certain that it hurts–but it’s real. The emptiness is real.
–
The dreams continue unabated. The dream does. Each night he is set upon that same course of fire and ruin. Zenos dreams that dream and none else, and nothing about it changes.
He takes it upon himself, then, to deviate. First he savors the course, stopping to bask in the sights and sounds and even the taste in the air, all the copper and the sulfur. He takes the path to ruin with unhurried steps. Later, he changes course, winding around rubble, weaving around the dead. He just wants to see it a little more. He just wants to feel it–just a little more.
He walks and walks. He never reaches the end of the end; he always wakes up first. How much farther can there be?
–
It’s strange: now Zenos thinks often of the emperor. He finds himself wondering what the emperor might be doing in the morning, in the afternoon. Is the old man sleeping on his chair? What else does he do with his time? The thoughts are fleeting but more colorful than any others. Zenos tries to imagine it–he can even picture the emperor’s face. How’s that for new? When has a man’s face been anything to Zenos but silt falling to the bottom of a riverbed?
It is the emptiness, Zenos is sure. Now that he knows what it feels like, he sees it in the emperor’s eyes, in the shape of his mouth, the shadow of his brow: the emperor knows what it feels like, too. The emperor may claim that Zenos resembles someone’s beloved corpse, but Zenos wouldn’t know anything about that. He’s not familiar with anyone, and no one is familiar with him. Not until now–not until the emperor, the emptiness, and the throne room. Zenos has not once before left a lingering presence; he has only been solid, the weight of his footsteps, the form of his penmanship, the clacking of his practice sword. Never a thought for the sake of it. Never a boy for the sake of it.
But the emperor was thinking about him, too. The emperor has a question for him as soon as Zenos comes to him. Zenos approaches the throne, drawn–impossibly–toward the emperor who is drawn toward him in turn. This pull between them, be it of blood or the barren halls of their hearts, sees the emperor leaning forward on his throne, as if to hear the answer half an instant sooner. “Well? Did you ask him?”
Zenos flutters his eyelashes over the allegedly dead color of his eyes. “What do you mean?”
“Your father, boy. You and I brewed an inquiry of him, and I won’t have you fobbing me off. Did you ask your father if he hates the way you look?”
They brewed it together. Zenos rocks back on his heels with the antsiness of other boys his age. “Oh. I did.”
“And what did he tell you?” The emperor taps his fingers on the arm of the throne, and Zenos watches because of how it sounds–the thought is compulsive: like a bloodhound’s claws clicking through its loping gait–until the emperor snaps his fingers quickly to get the boy’s attention. “Come, now, be forthright or I’ll have no more of you.”
Nothing in Zenos’ face or posture says that it bothers him to hear this, but it must bother him enough that he obliges. “He told me nothing. He waved someone over to take me away. I haven’t seen him since.”
The emperor leans back in his seat, nodding to himself, satisfied. “I would wager that’s a tender yes.”
Just past the emperor’s beard, his bottom lip does something in particular, and it gleams. “You like it,” Zenos observes. “You’re pleased. When my father is troubled, you almost smile. I can see the spit on your teeth.”
The emperor wrinkles his nose. The unhappy curl of his lip etches through his white beard. Ah, there is the glisten–the spit–but displeased, now. “Don’t mind my teeth,” says the emperor. “And don’t mind your father’s troubles, either. What do they matter to you? He is already who and what he is, and his unhappiness has made him that way.” He scoffs, or laughs, or just coughs into his beard; hard to tell. “Come to think of it, it has really done the same for you. Whatever you would have been without your sire’s woes was starved out and stillborn and long since decayed.”
“I don’t mind them.” Zenos says it faintly, half-withdrawn from the statement for how little it matters. He is instead preoccupied with the spit–with the teeth–with the emperor’s smile and the lack of it. “Your teeth are like a rodent’s since you’re old. So I notice when you’re pleased.”
“This creature wants to be shot,” mutters the emperor.
Zenos pays it no heed. “What about me was stillborn? I’m alive, right here.”
“Are you?” says the emperor. He is dry in the way of chapped lips: the sudden taste of blood, then the belated prickle, the sting. But the blood is sluggish in moving from the lip to the tongue.
The flavor is delectable.
“Aren’t I?” Zenos asks. He is leaning in toward his great-grandsire like a boy enthralled by a faerie tale.
The emperor snorts. “Not by my reckoning. I suppose no one has bothered to tell you, but I would presume it to be clear: you were born during a season of famine. By the time you wriggled out of your mother’s body, there was no more love to feed you. And if you have starved since infancy, will that not have killed you? Will that not have killed what you would have been?”
He sounds like sudden blood, the lip to the tongue, and the flavor is delectable.
“What would I have been?” Zenos asks.
The emperor turns his gaze onto Zenos’ face–the fullness of his gaze, the volume of it, no different than water in the lungs. Zenos sees the color of his eyes more clearly than ever before. Scrying into the emperor’s irises isn’t like seeing a man naked, for Zenos has no such associations of furtive awe with flesh. This is beyond the flesh–perhaps beneath it–an intimacy too deep and tangible, as if his great-grandsire has reached into his belly and now accounts for everything inside of Zenos by counting with his fingers. It’s more circumspect than the gutting of game, but it is no less an inspection of what he contains. Zenos has never been looked at in this way, and he could believe that his great-grandfather’s hand is rearranging something inside him.
“Nothing much,” says the emperor. He sounds disappointed.
–
Most mornings, Zenos sits at a table big enough to seat twelve and eats his breakfast in silence. He eats it alone. Then, by the eighth bell, he must meet with his tutor of literature. The route from the dining room to the library is the same each time, so he walks it. Again and again and again. For how long? For how much longer?
Come to think of it, being awake sounds just like being in the dream. The same path is presented to him, and he is naturally expected to take it. What would he replace it with? What else does he have? So he walks the path. But with the dream–well, he realized that he could do something else. Couldn’t he now?
This morning, he does. He leaves the dining room and takes twenty-five paces down the corridor. Then he stops. He’s supposed to go straight. He’s supposed to go to the library. He turns left, down a different hall.
Zenos arrives at the throne room in time to see a soldier shouldering his way through the great doors. The soldier exits in a saunter, barely sparing Zenos a glance, put out about something or other. Zenos puts his hand flat against one of the doors. He rests for just a moment. Then he pushes against the door so he can peer into the room. There is the throne. Zenos lets himself inside, and breaks the law by trotting right up to the seat of imperial power.
Not halfway through the morning, and the emperor is asleep. It’s not surprising to see him asleep, but Zenos thinks now that neither has he paid much attention to it before this. He looks closely at the emperor. He sees a beard that’s spent years growing over a face that’s spent years frowning. He sees sloped shoulders without the strength to lift the head atop them, to lift the crown. He sees hands that shake as if it’s bitter winter, and he sees sweat upon a mottled brow. Exhaustion. That’s what Zenos sees. No reprieve in slumber. Just more and more and more of the same.
It’s that way for Zenos as well: more of the same. Slumber but not reprieve. Then does he look like this when he sleeps, too? Would he hang his head if he sat in this chair?
He sits, instead, beside it. He presses his whole side up against it and rests his cheek on its arm. His head is not close enough to touch his great-grandsire’s fingers–but close to them. Close to them. Zenos closes his eyes and thinks. He feels.
It’s a while before the emperor wakes. Zenos can hear it when it happens: the sighs, the straining, the disappointment. The emperor does not like to rouse. Zenos wants to hear him do it again. It seems naked compared to his other expressions of displeasure. The frank misery of it is like a mineral just hewn from the earth, covered in dust and debris, unfit for any lapidarist’s hand. It is pure. It’s like an ugly secret, not for sale or display. Not to be acknowledged.
Eventually, the emperor gets his bearings. He shifts around, looks around. There’s the glorious golden top of his son’s head–no, no, another boy’s–and he sets his palm atop it as if he is, himself, an aureole. After a moment, he takes it away.
Zenos lifts one hand out of his lap and touches his own hair. “Are you going to do that again?” he asks. It’s a strange question and he knows it, but that doesn’t matter to him. What matters is that he had not known that someone could–would ever–touch him that way, and now he urgently desires to know whether it could–might ever–happen again.
“No,” says the emperor. “I don’t think I will. What are you doing here? Haven’t you got something princely to do?”
“If lessons are princely,” Zenos says, “then I have got that.”
“Yet I see you’re not in attendance.” The emperor clucks his tongue, lofty–no, aerial. Not high up, but lighthearted. “Varis, your boy is a delinquent…”
“I don’t think he minds,” says Zenos, though it’s more like a question than anything else.
“Hm, hm, hm. No, it will encroach upon his pride. He resents that sort of thing. Well, ‘tis only mine opinion.” The emperor settles, then sits up straighter, clinking once more like coins. “Here–we could make a bet of it. If he should strike you in anger, you’ll owe me.”
“All right,” says Zenos. “But he never strikes me.”
“Never?”
“We’re not together enough for that.”
“Ah.” At first, Zenos thinks the emperor is again disappointed–but maybe he is thoughtful, on closer inspection. “Your lessons, then. What have you skipped to come and pester me?”
As if the thought is a hound nosing into his hand, Zenos remembers: the emperor won’t touch his head again. He takes his cheek from the arm of the throne and sets his chin on his knees. His blue eyes remain raised to His Radiance “Literature.”
“Skipping out on literature! Oh dear.” The emperor sounds like–Zenos has trouble with this one–oh, like a honey bun: thick and rich, sticky, dripping with sweets–but it isn’t sweet. It is rancid scorn. “A boy with no love for prose and poetry in my palace… You know, I’ve been most gracious and forgiving of your slights, but for this, I ought to do away with you.”
A wave breaks. Zenos didn’t know it was cresting in the first place, but now it crashes. “You’re wrong.” He has reared away from the throne, skittering back with his shoulders hiked high, and he can feel himself frowning. His face might be shaped like a serpent’s. “I read by myself. That is what I want to do. When the tutors tell me what to read, or when they read to me, it’s boring.” He thinks again–it seems like madness even to him–he thinks of the mother putting that piece of lemon into her baby’s mouth. The betrayal. The emperor is wrong about him. “And I hate them for boring me. If I could sew their mouths shut, I would do that.”
The wave broke. There was the foam, the waters all churning. But now the churning subsides, the waters recede, and there is just the shore with Zenos left bewildered upon it.
The emperor laughs at him. “Can’t you?” he says.
The churning subsides. There is just the shore. Zenos blinks, his blue eyes like water going calm, no violent tide. He wants to sew their mouths shut. He never thought about whether he could or could not.
“And so what is it you like to read?” the emperor asks. He’s smiling. There is the spit on his teeth, the shine Zenos sees when the emperor is spiteful about Zenos’ father. “What would keep you from being bored?”
“I…” This is no longer the betrayal on the baby’s fat face. It’s the bewilderment. “I read a book of poetry the other day… penned by Seneca cen Balbus. He begged leave to travel with an Imperial legion, and he wrote about what he saw. The landscapes.”
“That he did,” says the emperor, and his voice is not sweltering, it’s not the fire of dreams–but Zenos feels that it is warm. “Why, I didn’t take you for the type to admire an impulsive artist’s nature walks.”
Zenos feels like the poet, now: the new steps, the sight of the horizon. “It’s the novelty he described,” he says. “The newness. Other places. He wrote about what he was beginning to understand.”
The man and the boy are staring at each other. Zenos looks his age; there is something impossible about the emperor. “That he did,” the emperor says again. He clears his throat to recite.
“Beyond our camp and through the morning haze
I spy a cap of snow against the sky.
A storm, peregrine with us now for days,
Had thieved the blue firmament from mine eye
And draped a chapel veil, a grey train
About our company from brow to boot–
But now! I see through dissipating rain
The verdant veil about a mountain’s root
A forest, simmering with life, is far
Beyond my back; ahead of me is mud,
The hoary shroud, and my brothers-in-arms.
I march at their behest just as I should:
I follow my brothers into the grey.
The simmer of life gets further away.”
“Yes,” says Zenos. “I’ve read that one…” How many times? “I have read that one.”
“Do you understand it?” asks the emperor.
“I’ve read it,” Zenos says.
The emperor is smiling, like he’s being mean. He’s smiling like he would smile at Zenos’ father. “Do you want to understand it?”
“I want to read it again,” Zenos says.
“Come here,” says the emperor. Zenos does it. He stays low to the ground, shuffle-crawling like a child, just a yalm back to the throne. The emperor lied to him: he reaches over the arm of the throne and sets his hand, again, at the top of Zenos’ head. “Do you understand at all? Why is it that you come here to while away the quiet hours with a tired old man?”
For the feeling; for the emptiness. For the lack of droning flies. Zenos opens his mouth before he works out how to word any of it. “I like the way your voice sounds.”
The emperor strokes his hair. “Oh?”
“It makes me want to fall asleep.” Then will come the unchanging dream.
The emperor’s thumb brushes over the golden inheritance of his great-grandson’s hair. He laughs into his beard. “So you come to me for lullabies. You really have got a starving little heart.”
Zenos doesn’t answer that. He might not have heard it. He continues, “You sound like you are dying.”
When the emperor laughs this time, it’s hardly a breath, more of a sticky wheeze. The length of his thumbnail touches the downy hair at Zenos’ temple, and he presses the edge against that young skin, a little hard–a little harder. “Not quite yet, I imagine. Not just yet.”
Zenos does not notice. He is enchanted with his own revelation; he has finally figured out how to articulate it. At last, he knows what it means, what he hears, what soothes him to sleep. And he might understand the sonnet, now, too. He speaks like he’s dreaming–the heat, the chill, the end, unchanging–when he says, “You sound like you are already dead.”