“But if,” Ari continued, “there is law, and if even the most powerful of men, even a King, is subject to the law, and if all the people see the strength of the law, then all will learn that greed and cruelty can be contained, and thus, inequalities in wealth and power will begin to be lessened. Am I correct?”
“You are correct,” the General answered.
“I am to go on trial, then,” said William Starling, who no longer sounded as bold and sure as Lorenzo Apiedi, nor like a King in his throne room. “Who will judge me?”
“I will,” General Balcor answered. “I will put you into prison and bring you to trial and be your judge.”
“For murder,” said William Starling.
“Yes,” said the General.
“Which you will declare to be a hanging offense.”
“Yes,” said the General.
“Who will defend me? If there is no law and no lawyer to argue the justice of my case?”
“I will,” Max offered.
“You’re dead,” the General reminded him.
“I will,” Ari said.
“He killed your secretary,” the General said.
“I must defend myself,” said William Starling.
“Yes.”
“There is the matter of these attempts on Max’s life,” Ari said. “Where murder was planned, and the perpetrator has not been identified. Doesn’t the law speak to those?”
“Why didn’t you tell me?” his father asked Max.
“How could I tell you?”
“You could have found a way,” his father announced.
“I was busy making a plan to rescue you and my mother,” Max said. “I was busy being worried about you,” he snapped.
“With good reason, as it turns out,” said his father, with a laugh.
“Did you order the attempts, General?” Ari asked.
“What do you think?” asked the General.
“I thought I knew,” Ari answered, “but now I am not so sure.”
The General nodded and did not answer Ari’s question but said only, “I do not wish my actor to spend too many nights in our prison, in the care of Captain Malpenso’s guards. I can, I think, protect him for a day or two. I hope.”
Max’s father had grown pale, and Max did not think he was acting.
“So the trial will be the day after tomorrow, which gives time for the soldiers to spread the word and gather the people. You might advise your housekeeper to get rid of those two servants,” General Balcor said, and he turned on his heels and strode off, down the long room toward the closed doors.
“What about the body?” Ari called after him.
The General turned back and Max could have sworn he was swallowing laughter. “The Secretary? Alexander Ireton? I suggest you ask the young man yourself. He seems a nimble-minded fellow,” and he opened the doors wide and called out to his Captain, “Malpenso! Take the murderer down to the cells!”
There wasn’t much time. Max lay down again, to be dead, but asked, “Is she really?”
“Why else do you think I cued you from The Queen’s Man?” his father asked.
“For the swordplay,” Max said, from his position over his puddle of chicken blood.
“Then why didn’t you die on cue?” his father demanded.
Because I had my own plan to save you, Max would have said, had he not been dead. He was getting angry again, as he remembered that by now they could be packing the King’s body away into a coffin and Ari could be demanding not only that Max stand trial in his own country but also that the King’s body be carried to his native land for its burial, with the Queen echoing Ari’s request and insisting that she had to accompany it. His father had ruined everything, and now Max had no idea what to do.
It was possible, he knew, that General Balcor had schemed to bring William Starling to Andesia to be the final straw—that is to say, the final King, who proved to everyone the necessity of creating law in Andesia. That was certainly what the General seemed to be saying he wanted. But it was also possible that the General had done this so that he himself could become King.
Soldiers marched up the long room, boots loud on marble.
But the General, Max realized now, hadn’t known that Devera and Suela had already left the guesthouse the day before. If they weren’t working for the General, who were they working for? And why would that person, whoever it was, want the King’s brother dead? He took a breath to ask these questions.
“Dead men don’t breathe,” Ari told him.
Suddenly everybody was telling Max what to do.
“I’ll carry you out,” Ari said. He bent over to lift Max into a fireman’s hold, laying Max across his shoulders and gripping an arm and a leg.
General Balcor had flung open the doors, and the people gathered there drew back in shock as the handsome, red-headed Envoy, stone-faced, carried his man out and away, down the wide corridor. They turned quickly back in order not to miss Captain Malpenso leading the prisoner off in the opposite direction, the King, crownless and surrounded by soldiers.
The Rescue
• ACT II •
SCENE 3 THE DEFENSE PREPARES
Max lay limp across Ari’s shoulders, limp and lifeless, with empty, staring eyes and ears forever stoppered now—soldiers marched ahead of Ari and behind him; soldiers know death—as the Envoy walked wordlessly along the palace corridors, across the courtyard, and into the roadway, a gentle rain falling on them all, and the final few steps to the guarded guesthouse door and inside.
Max lay limp and lifeless, but his brain battered against its bony prison. Think, he needed to think, he needed a plan, a whole new plan.
When Ari lowered Max from his shoulders, “This isn’t what you said would happen,” Mr. Bendiff greeted him.
“It’s not what any of us expected,” Grammie agreed. “What is wrong with your father, Max? What has he gotten her into?”
“What do we do now?” Tomi asked.
Max shook his head. He had no idea. He was so…foiled by his father, and trapped by what his father had done, and so angry, too, that he couldn’t think. But he had to think, and think in some entirely new way. He needed to be alone and quiet, to think.
“We have a day and a half to figure that out,” Ari pointed out.
“What about Mary?” Grammie insisted.
“She’s pregnant,” Max announced angrily. The information silenced his grandmother.
Max needed, first, to learn as much as he could about what was going on. About what the person behind things was after. If he could figure that out, he could figure out who that person was.
Was the object of all this the throne? The mines? Or was Balcor the invisible playwright-director and the law his real objective? Now Max wondered, and he asked, “Why doesn’t the King own the mines? And if he never did, how did the royal house get so rich?”
That, Mr. Bendiff could explain. “Half of the earnings go into the royal treasury. Juan Luc told me it’s always been that way, whoever sat on the throne. The Carrera y Carreras keep ownership and the right to work the mines by—it’s bribery, really—paying half of what the mines make into the royal treasury.”
“You know, Max, what Balcor says about the importance of laws is true,” Ari said.
“What did he say about that?” Colly asked. “Do you believe him, Max?”
“I don’t know what to believe in what Balcor says,” Max admitted.
“If he’s the one behind it all, and he’s also the judge, your father doesn’t stand a chance,” Joachim observed.
“A duel is between two equal and consenting parties,” Ari pointed out. “So it was self-defense. But if that argument fails—and it seems as if the General intends it to—we’ll have to have someone else to cast suspicion on.”
“But there were a dozen witnesses!” Mr. Bendiff protested. “Everybody there could testify.”
“Unless they’re too afraid to speak up,” Tomi said.
Max had an idea. “Wha
t if there were no body?”
“That’s not an option,” Ari warned. “If it comes out that we faked your death, I don’t know what Balcor will do. Nobody can find out you’re alive, Max.”
“We just don’t know enough,” Colly urged. “We have to learn more.”
“Starting now,” Tomi agreed. “Come on, Colly. We’ll go to the plaza and see if anybody’s saying anything about it, and what they know.”
“I am going to finish my pot of chicken soup,” Grammie announced unhelpfully. “Well,” she said, in answer to the expressions on their faces, “I don’t like waste and I had those chickens…We’ll have soup for supper, at least.”
“Ari and I can talk with Stefano,” Mr. Bendiff offered. “I have the excuse of looking over his stock and giving him advice. We don’t know how much he knows, and he might know something.”
“If we knew how the soldiers feel,” Ari said, “that might tell us something.”
“I can do that,” Joachim said. “With a sketchbook—what if I do portraits? I can go anywhere and nobody really notices me. I’m just a man with a sketchbook.”
“What about me?” asked Max. “If I can’t leave the house, what can I do?”
“Start packing us up,” Grammie answered unsympathetically, speaking over her shoulder as she withdrew to the kitchen.
The others left the house, Grammie went to the kitchen, and Max turned to the staircase, to start packing…and not stew about what his father had done and the trouble they were all in because of it. Because he had to think, and hard, about what was really going on, and what solution he could come up with. Preferably one that would give them all the best chance of not dying here in Andesia.
At that thought, his feet broke into a run, his feet pounding on the wooden steps as hard as his heart pounded against his ribs.
—
Despite the steady drizzle, a few hopeful women sat at the edge of the wide plaza, chupallas, eggs, yams, and in one case a few pieces of woven cloth spread out on blankets, ready to be bartered or sold. They hunched under ponchos while a few small children ignored the wet altogether and ran about chasing a wooden ball, or battered one another with sticks. Tomi and Colly approached a woman who was offering three small woven baskets, each holding four eggs. They asked for two of the baskets. The seated woman assured them, barely glancing at them, that Balcor would pay, and then, when her neighbor spoke urgently to her, she looked up with a question.
By that time, the people in the market understood that the housekeeper and her two boys knew a little Spanish, although they didn’t suspect how much. The neighbor had said, in a low voice, “Ask them. Ask. They will know.”
Tomi and Colly pretended not to have heard. They looked up at the sky, where low clouds hid the mountain heights, and Tomi remarked, “Looks like it’ll turn into a real rain tonight,” and Colly answered, “Let me do the talking.” Tomi had no trouble with that. He was a person who did things, not someone quick with words.
“At a nod from her neighbor, the egg seller turned back to the boys, looking up at them out of serious dark eyes. “You go to tree-ya-la?” She used the word in their language. “After, will be new King of Andesia and Señor Juan Carlos gives everyone a feast. With meat,” she concluded. She spoke in very simple Spanish so the boys could understand her.
“Pigs from Stefano’s farm,” the neighbor added eagerly.
A third woman watched the boys’ reactions. “But maybe this tree-ya-la is to make a pig from us,” she said. “In a corral. Animals?”
Colly shook his head, to say they didn’t understand her.
“Pigs for the soldiers to shoot,” she explained.
“The soldiers will shoot? Shoot everyone?” Colly thought he must have misunderstood.
“Maybe it happens.” Nods, yes, gestures of guns pointing, triggers being pulled, yes, that could happen.
“Not shoot my masters,” said Colly. “Not shoot us,” he pointed at Tomi and then at himself.
No, shakes of the head, then shrugs because soldiers sometimes made mistakes in who they shot, as everyone knew.
“Will you stay home?” Colly wondered.
Shrugs, glances, one at the other. “If we do not go, they will come to shoot in our house.”
“Why?” Colly asked.
He was told, in gentle tones and simple language, as a mother speaks to her child, that soldiers do as they are told. “The King orders and the soldiers obey. Now the King has murdered a man.”
“We are unlucky in our kings, we Andesians.”
“Unless la bruja can bring the dead man to life again?” the egg seller asked hopefully.
“Bruja?”
Tomi defined it quietly. “Witch.”
The women nodded confidentially at the boys. “We know. Suela told everyone. She feared to live with a bruja, and Devera feared to live alone with foreigners.”
The neighbor was more hopeful, or perhaps she didn’t want to upset the boys. “Kings will be kings and maybe the soldiers don’t shoot. Maybe they guard and after we will feast.”
“I have not heard the voices of pigs,” the third woman observed. “If we are to feast, where are the pigs?”
—
When Max came downstairs for a glass of water or a cup of tea, with Ari’s trunk half filled with carefully folded clothing and his mind half filled with possible guilty parties and possible lines of action to follow, he called to his grandmother from the bottom of the stairs. “Grammie?” Now that there was nobody but the rescue party in the guesthouse, he could use her real name.
But nobody answered. Grammie wasn’t there, and Max was alone in the house. Where had his grandmother gone?
In the kitchen, a pot of soup bubbled quietly on the stove and vegetable peelings lay scattered all over the table. Max cleared up and cleaned off, and waited for someone to return.
Nobody returned.
Max went out to the courtyard and sat on the bench, and waited for someone to return. In the gathering dusk, his thoughts began to argue among themselves. His thoughts were not comforting companions.
Nobody returned, and the air grew cool, so he went back inside. He put a kettle of water on the stove and put tea leaves into the pot, to be ready. He couldn’t settle down. He didn’t like not being free to leave the house, even if there was nowhere for him to go. He wondered if his parents had felt that way, all these months in their tower, and then he wondered what his father was doing behind the iron bars of a dark prison cell, deep under the palace. And he waited.
When at last he heard the guesthouse door opening, Max almost ran into the hallway, to find out…something, anything, whatever there was to be known. What was happening out in Apapa?
“Max?” His grandmother’s voice. Before he could say anything, she repeated, “Max!”
“Here,” he answered, just like a boy in school, as he stepped into the hall.
Grammie was carrying a large covered pot in both hands, and Max was so relieved to see her that he was almost angry. “I didn’t know where you were. It’s getting late and you didn’t say where you were going.”
Grammie went past him into the kitchen. He followed. She put her pot down on the table, and when she turned to look right at him, he saw on her face a happily worried smile.
Unless, he thought, studying her, it was a worriedly happy smile.
“I saw her, Max. I went there. I decided to try and I went and I saw her. The baby is due in May, which explains the sickness. But she also made herself a pillow to look more pregnant so that— It’s a terrible mess, Max, I don’t know how— Where’s Joachim, anyway? Shouldn’t Hamish and Ari be back by now, to have time to change for dinner? I better put some water on for them to wash up in, and where are the boys?”
Grammie sank down into a chair, unwound the wet shawl from her neck, and said, “I saw her, Max, I talked with her, she’s…she’s all right. Upset, worried about him, and very unhappy, but…she’s herself.” Grammie smiled, remembering, then added, “It?
??s a real mess.”
Max poured the hot water into the teapot and set out two glasses while Grammie settled down. When they sat facing one another, drinking hot tea, she set off talking again. “She has no idea what your father will do. He planned to insist on returning your body to Queensbridge, that was his idea. I have to say, yours was much better.”
“He’s an actor,” Max said. He didn’t know why he was defending his father. But, “I guess the General surprised him as much as us,” he admitted. “With this trial. How did you get into the palace, Grammie? How did you convince the soldiers to let you pass?”
“I looked them straight in the eye and told them my soup had special healing powers.” Grammie was so pleased with her cleverness that, because Tomi and Colly had come into the room at that point, with Joachim just behind them, she boasted about what she’d done. “I gave them the hairy eyeball, the way I used to treat misbehaving students—one of them muttered, ‘Bruja,’ and that’s fine by me. ‘Sí,’ I said, ‘mágico,’ and they backed away. Chicken soup is well-known to be good for the sickly,” she concluded smugly. After all, she had done what nobody else had been able to do. “It is practically magic, how much good it does. I guess soldiers are as superstitious as anybody else,” Grammie said. “Which is lucky for me.”
Joachim warned, “Don’t be foolish, Aurora. You better be careful. Those soldiers are uneasy and confused. Worse, they’re nervous, and nervous soldiers make me nervous. Not a one wanted his picture drawn, not a one dared to refuse when I picked him out, and not a one said anything more than sí or no to me or anyone else. Not where I could hear him. You should stay close to home, Aurora.”
Grammie laughed, “It’s a little late for that, isn’t it? What do you make of it all, Max?”
“Nothing useful,” he admitted, but added hopefully, “yet. Maybe Ari and Mr. Bendiff will find out something from Stefano or at dinner.”
—
Ari looked across white linen, through silver candelabra, down the long table at the assembled guests. Candlelight flattered every face, but especially Elizaveta’s, and it caught at the heavy silver dessert spoons the way the sun catches at the waves on a lake, making the surface sparkle. The final course of that evening’s meal was a cake layered with pudding and slices of canned peaches “from California,” Juan Carlos boasted to his guests. “One read of this new preservative process, and our clever Stefano,” with a nod in the direction of that merchant, “was able to procure them for me. They are as fresh as if grown in our own gardens,” he was pleased to say. “It is very new, very modern.” He smiled, including everyone in his satisfaction. “My table offers wines from France, coffee from Brazil, and now peaches from the United States. Even on this unhappy day, how can we not feel fortunate to be the Carrera y Carreras of Andesia?”