The Apple-Tree Throne Read online

  I had not until that moment felt that I was about to faint, but as the old man speaks I realize that he is quite right. The champagne, being the dainty quantity that fits into a crystal flute, does nothing for my thirst, but lifts my spirits slightly. I have not had the opportunity to have much of it in my life, except at Clark’s wedding.

  “I apologize; I cannot recollect your name, sir.”

  “Brigadier-General Krishnamurthy, at your service. Long-time acquaintance of the Pondsmiths — and the Wickersleys, of course. Oh, look at them, the ladies of the hour… lost three sons between ‘em, and they wear no mourning, and have tied ribbons in their hair.”

  He points with his luxuriantly bearded chin, and I follow the gesture to Mrs. Wickersley and Mrs. Pondsmith, who indeed — though I had not noticed it — are dressed gaily in lilac and cerulean below their white lace shawls. At the very least Mr. Wickersley, in his old regimental uniform, is wearing his black armband, the same standard-issue one as mine, though reddish and faded from age.

  “She wears black at the house,” I tell him, though something within me roils and tumbles and roars at the words, and it pains me to make excuses for her, though I know not why.

  He sighs, his face softening at what he perhaps perceives in my own expression. “Their little lads are barely a month in the ground, and they wear their grief like a coat to be hung in a corner when they wish to entertain. But never mind. These are old army families, Lieutenant Braddock, and I believe, to their minds, sons have no purpose except to go and die in a war.”

  “I’m sure they don’t think that, sir.”

  “It was the damned draft, that’s what it was,” he says venomously, pronouncing the word as if it is itself a curse. “And their preposterous names, to fool children into believing they were Supreme-Class, and Optimal-Class, and Superior-Class! When a man signs up, he might have a wife and a few children before he is blown to smid’reens; but when a lad of eighteen or twenty is made to go…”

  “They still have another son to carry on the name,” I say, though I know it is inadequate.

  He snorts. “‘Cliffy.’ Until the draft, he was their great pride — and we know what comes before the fall!”

  I am quite stunned by this, for having met both men I cannot see why the younger son was not preferred, but after a moment’s reflection I remember that Clifford Wickersley has two children, and such is the way of grandmothers that she would have prized them above all things. Then when he was not drafted, she might have switched her preference to his brother, hoping for a safe return of course — but also, though she would never admit it, the accompanying fame and attention. Instead, her reward was a poisoned mix of pity and notoriety, and her relationship with her older son must have been irreparably damaged.

  It occurs to me that perhaps Krishnamurthy knows why the elder Wickersley brother was not drafted, but I cannot ask him tonight; there are too many hangers-on, and it might upset Mrs. Wickersley. Instead, I say, “The Wickersleys have been very kind to me.”

  “Daresay they have. Daresay they have. They’re good people, f’r all their drama,” he concedes. “And losing their youngest, I’d not wish that on anyone, even if every generation unto the dawn of time had expected it.”

  I hold my breath, for I know what he is working around to; his eyes shine with it, though he is trying to rein it in. Even his beard trembles with anticipation.

  “What really happened out there, Braddock?”

  I exhale, and my leg twinges, and I nod, as if he has asked me something else entirely. “What have you heard, sir?”

  “The official report, you mean?” He pauses, and reflects for a long time. I have read the official accounts myself, all of them, and I have watched the viz broadcasts discussing it, and I have been in the meetings in which the official report was created, and I hope he does not try to lie to me, because I will know.

  “Well, they’ve been telling people that top brass ordered a sortie in the valley,” he says slowly. “Trying to knock out Captain Eleutherios while it seemed he had limited mobility. But the 407th Regiment, headed by Major-General Wickersley, made a sudden retreat at the foot of the valley…right into enemy forces. You were pinned down, flanked and outnumbered. Then Captain Eleutherios himself captured Wickersley and waited till the vizcasters set up their cameras to…well.”

  “Yes, sir.” Now I feel dizzy, not the pleasant whirl of champagne but the vertigo I felt upon first seeing Wickersley’s ghost — the torn wound in his strong young neck, the uniform soaked with his life’s blood, the silent scream.

  The story recounted is precisely the true story, but it cannot capture the day in that valley — from the soft damp dawn so full of hope, smelling of impending rain and strange herbs, the whir of our clumsy ornithopters that were no match for our adversaries, to those final desperate dusty moments standing ankle-deep in the blood of my comrades on the valley-floor, staring into a gun-barrel, and hearing someone cry “Halt! It is done!”

  A gun-barrel, of course, is barely as wide as a thumb, but it had seemed to open up and swallow me into its darkness, though I knew I stood in bright sunlight; I had been disarmed long before, after killing more of the mercenaries than I could count, and all I could think was whether they had seen the same thing as me. I had lost track of Clark, and Fitzharris, and Marchand, and Bhatt the Smaller, and Bhatt the Larger, and all my other comrades and friends, and I did not know whether they were dead or alive. And then far in the distance, the magnificence of that lapis-crusted golden chariot, sparkling in the sun, and the tiny poppy bursting into being — the beauty of that many-petalled bloom!

  Voices, voices everywhere.

  “Find a chair, for God’s sake!”

  “Get his feet up, that’s the ticket.”

  “Fetch some water!”

  From the darkness of the gun-barrel swim faces, strange and too close, and I strike out instinctively, not recalling my training at all but childhood fights, scuffles for bread or jobs, dirty blows with elbows and knees. And then a great weakness passes over me, and I see a face I do know — not a wartime face but Mrs. Wickersley, white beneath her powder rouge.

  “How do you feel, Benjamin dear?” she whispers, and pats my hand.

  I am soaked in sweat; I sit up cautiously, and discover that I am in a dark corner between fireplace and window, in a velvet arm-chair with my feet upon a stool. Krishnamurthy is behind her, extremely distressed.

  “It’s my fault, it’s all my doing,” he says. “I saw that he looked unwell but gave him no opportunity to eat nor drink…”

  “Nonsense,” Mrs. Wickersley says without a change in her tone, though her face is flinty as she continues to stroke my hand. “It’s the heat, that’s all. Take off your cloak, dear; I’ll have one of the girls hang it up, and we’ll find you some supper.”

  “Please do not burden yourself on my account,” I croak, and swing my legs to the floor, riding out another wave of dizziness; my leg thumps like a drum, a strange sensation, not quite pain. “I…I…”

  The paper, I saw the paper, appearing from nowhere in a cloud of the messenger’s galloping dust. Light yellow, thinner than onionskin, written upon in official military cuneiform, I saw it in his hand, in his very hand. He looked up and he knew that I had seen; our eyes met, blue and gray, gray and blue, he knew I saw it, he knew.

  “Benjamin?”

  “I’m all right,” I gasp. I stand to prove it, and clumsily unclip my cloak from my shoulders. “Come, Mrs. Wickersley, I believe I saw a plum-pudding upon the sideboard.”

  As we stride off, it occurs to me that I did not answer the Brigadier-General’s question.

  It is of no account; I eat a helping of plum-pudding with stewed apple, and dressed potatoes, and a cheese-soufflé, and I feel much better, particularly after a few glasses of punch. Burantai Pass has come and gone, it cannot harm me now, and it cannot happen again. The worst is behind me and will stay there. The worst is behind. Tha
t is its home now.

  Miss Meyers arrives fashionably late, resplendent in a violet silk gown that I cannot help but conclude is cut from the same stuff that lines my dress cloak, and I wonder if that has been done on purpose, or whether she simply liked the colour in the dressmaker’s. The answer to my idle curiosity comes later, as she targets and fires herself at the various military men in the room, all of whom seem well-acquainted with her, and seem to welcome her chatter. I watch as her eyes seize upon and worry all the pips and stripes like a terrier with a rat.

  Between conversations she returns to me again and again with glasses of punch or wine, having been told of my fainting-spell, insisting I must be parched, for a healthy young man like me would not have gone down in such a manner unless it were because of the heat in the room.

  Once I am watered to her satisfaction, we waltz, and though I feel quite clumsy compared to her and indeed every other feminine guests, I think I conduct myself reasonably well compared to the other soldiers. Each time I pass a couple of which one half is in dress uniform, I try to meet his eye to express the conundrum in which we find ourselves, and by the third or fourth song we are all grinning at one another over our partners’ heads. Such is the brotherhood of the military, in which one finds commonality so swiftly that one’s comrades soon seem like family, which is the only way to survive three years in a place so far from home.

  “I’m simply roasting,” Miss Meyers informs me as we finish a sixth song. “Like a Christmas goose. I think I shall step outside for a moment.”

  “Pray allow me to accompany you,” I recite, as it seems expected of me; though it seems improper, it would be far worse to allow a lady out there unaccompanied. She takes my arm and we use a side-door in a corridor behind the ball-room to escape into a chilly dusk, stars twinkling above the lavender mist rising from the Pondsmiths’ orchard. It smells of frost, and apples, and Miss Meyers’ gardenia powder. In her evening-dress, which of course leaves her shoulders and upper arms bare, I expect she will not wish to stay out here long. The coolness is a great relief however, and there are several other guests strolling about the terrace.

  “Are you quite recovered?” she asks solicitously, squeezing my arm.

  “Oh, yes. I…it was only a moment. The heat, I suppose.”

  “Then we shall stay out here,” she says.

  The Pondsmiths live on the south side of The Heights, and are not set up quite so high as Lindow House; I can see the lights of the town, that peculiar glow from the electric streetlights. It is everywhere now, thanks to Lady Ridgewell’s aqua-plants, which in some way generate electricity from tides and little waterfalls the way the old mills used to do. An aqua was built near my parents’ house when I was young— though we could not afford the electricity, of course — and I recall fondly the many afternoons my friends and I spent there fishing in the deep, still reservoir that had been built upstream of the dynamo, not like the one Vic and I had tried to fish in, all those years ago.

  “I suppose you know,” Miss Meyers says, not looking at me, “that Mr. Wickersley and myself were engaged to be married.”

  “No, I did not know that. I am…I continue to… I mean, please accept my sincere condolences. He did not inform us.”

  She shakes her head. “It was in his final letter from the front. It seems he thought the Federation was sufficiently close to victory that he might be home in three or four months, but…”

  I nod. I remember him writing his last letters — quickly, dashing them off really, on torn squares of paper from the label of a rice-bag. A few weeks before the final push, and the final retreat, and the day of his death.

  He had been laughing about something, and someone marvelled that he could write and speak at the same time. “Why, it is a technique I acquired in my youth,” he had said, continuing to write. “One never knows when one needs to do two things at once without either suffering.” Which had, of course, sparked off an extensively indecent conversation about the many things that the rest of us could do simultaneously without the benefit of study…

  The letter must have reached her around the same time as news of his death. O, unmerciful circumstance! I am overwhelmed by imagining it: perhaps both were in the mail-box on the same day, his letter and the newspaper describing the heinous act, like a poisonous snake.

  “He had not yet purchased a ring or petitioned my father,” she continues, “but the letter was sufficiently clear regarding his intent that I accepted it as his betrothal-pledge. I assumed we would complete the formalities upon his return.”

  “I am very sorry,” I say again, stupidly, for I can think of nothing else to say; Wickersley and Clark were agreed to be our wordsmiths, not I. Her arm is warm against my side. A sudden burst of laughter from the far side of the terrace erupts like a birdcall, making me jump.

  “Why did they call you Wickersley’s Irregulars?” she says softly, still looking out at the orchard.

  “It…it was a joke about Captain Eleutherios’ army,” I say. “Because they were not a true national force, having no nation, nor composed of several countries’ forces, like the Federation; they were mercenaries, paid by Eleutherios and his pirates. And so we began to discuss what precisely was the difference between them and us, inasmuch as we too were being paid to fight, and finally it was decided that the main issue was that we had never been offered sufficient monies by the other side to induce us to switch, so it was a mere lack of opportunity. Wickersley leapt up and cried out ‘This is highly irregular!’ and said he would personally execute the lot of us for treason, and then Lt. Bhatt pointed out that he would then have no one to command, and we began to call ourselves The Irregulars.”

  She is silent. I want to explain that it was necessarily less amusing in the telling; it was only so to begin with because we had not slept for many days and were becoming delirious. But there is nothing else to the story, and I do not wish to cause her pain by speaking of her lost love. We scrupulously followed the unspoken rule whilst overseas that we could not speak of the loves we had left behind. Boys were one thing, but we were so young that some of us only knew girls as the mysteriously fragranced beings who laughed behind their hands as we pranced past in our new uniforms, only recently determined to be quantifiably different from our sisters, mothers, cousins, and schoolfriends. We knew that Wickersley wrote to a young lady as well as his parents and brother, but we knew nothing else.

  “Perhaps we should go back inside,” I suggest. “You have not brought your mantle, and…”

  She turns, and places one silk-gloved hand at the back of my neck, and kisses me so that the rest of the sentence is mumbled into her open mouth. Her eyelashes flutter upon my cheek for a moment, and before I can so much as bring my hands up to embrace her, she is gone. I am alone upon the terrace, much confused, licking my lips, which taste of plum-pudding.

  When I finally collect my wits sufficiently to return to the party, it appears she has gone; I scan the ballroom and see no violet silk except the other fellows in dress uniform. Quietly, I retrieve my cloak, nodding to Mr. Wickersley as I do; I hope that he will tell Mrs. Wickersley that I have left, so that she does not worry.

  The night is cold and almost silent; far away a livelier party than ours, with pipe and fiddle, sends a trace of music into the air like a wisp of smoke. I walk down the long gravelled path back to the main gate, and when the keeper lets me out and shuts it behind me I finally feel I can breathe, as if some stifling smoke around my head has been abruptly blown away. My dress shoes thud on the road as I turn away from The Heights and head downhill; I had meant to purchase new ones before the party, but failing to, had borrowed a pair from Clark. They are slightly too big and I can feel my feet beginning to blister, but I keep walking.

  It was certainly impertinent of Miss Meyers to kiss me in that fashion, even if we were concealed by the darkness; and it is therefore probably impertinent to continue to think about it. The softness of her lips, the cool velvet of her che
ek under my nose, the way her grip knocked my hat askew. I correct it now, absently, as if Wickersley might leap out from behind a bush and announce a uniform inspection. He was never one to chuck his weight around, but he did love a surprise inspection.

  I cannot return to the guest-house. I refuse to deal with my commanding officer’s ghost tonight, and moreover, I feel certain that he will see my guilt scribbled across my face like a sailor’s tattoo. The two paltry medals I showed him jingle as I walk — the Federation Order of Manifest Valour, for hauling the wounded Ensign Montjoy out of a disastrous ambush a few months after we arrived; and the Greater Republic of Britannia Extraordinary Endurance Award for no other reason than that my leg had been nearly blown off in Burantai Pass. Nothing compared to Wickersley’s double-row of stars, crosses, blossoms, crests, and wings, and more than I wanted; I only meant to serve as long as I was forced to, and come home in one piece.

  I only meant to live.

  And they gave us medals for it, they wrote stories about it, as if we were the noble martyrs of long dead days. They were not there. Montjoy had bled so much I thought for certain I had been rescuing a carcass. He was pounds lighter by the time we reached the medical tent. My boots had filled with blood, running down my legs in a steady stream, and it took days to be issued new ones. What a thing to remember.

  My legs and back ache as I head into the outskirts of town, past the tumbledown stone walls that mark the official boundary between paupers and princes, or, in less lofty terms, where ordinary homes begin. A dog barks behind one of the houses, trailing into silence as I pass — a good watch-dog. Perhaps I should get one for the guest-house. I’ve always liked dogs, their forthright and uncomplicated loyalty.

  Children cry, laughter filters into the air, but most of the windows are darkened and silent, regular folks sleeping while the rich revel. The electric street-lights are not as plentiful here as at The Heights, but they have been installed upon some carefully-engineered scheme, for there is no darkness between their dropped pools of light. I walk under these, watching my luminous reflections shine in the darkness. I hope no one takes me for a ghost.