『泥の中の観察者』 ―王冠を剥奪された男英語バージョン本日kindle出版用の原稿完了

THE WATCHER IN THE MUD

The Man Stripped of His Crown

PART ONE — THE CROWN

One · The Cipher

There had come to be a smell in the bedchamber.

Not incense, not flowers. The king could not name it. Each night, as he lay down, it rose from somewhere near the pillow — cold, faintly sweet, and close to metal. At first he thought he imagined it. Then he thought it was the smell of an aging body. But he was far from sixty, and his hair was still black. In time he understood: it was not the smell of a person. It was the smell of the room itself. The room had a smell, and the smell was waiting for him.

The queen slept beside him. Or lay as if she slept. Her back had never once turned toward him. Sixteen years married, and he could not recall a single night her back had faced his way. It was not coldness. It was not hatred. It was only a back, there, like a wall.

He looked up at the ceiling. The stone of it was lost in the dark. Looking up at what he could not see, he thought again the thing he had been thinking lately.

Am I here.

A strange question. He was the king. He stood at the height of the country. In the morning men bowed their heads; at night men drew the clothes from his body; plates were laid on the table; seals were pressed to paper. In his name soldiers moved, in his name taxes were gathered, in his name men were judged. He was certainly here.

The sense that he was not here came from this: all of it would turn without him.

The seal could be pressed by any hand. The plate would be laid before anyone. The head bows to the crown, not to the face beneath it. If some morning his face were exchanged for another's, no one would notice, so long as the crown was the same. The number of bowed heads would not change. Only the smell knew. The room was not waiting for the king. It was waiting for the crown. What was inside did not matter.

He was beginning to understand that he was a cipher.

* * *

The table made it plainer.

He sat at one end of the long table, the queen at the other, far enough apart that a word had to be thrown to carry. So they seldom spoke. As though not speaking were itself the form of the thing, only the sound of silver touching the plates filled the hall.

The prince sat at his mother's side.

His son had turned fifteen, and grown that year. The voice had dropped, the line of the jaw had hardened, the roundness of the child was being pared away by the day. The father watched the change from the end of the table. Watching was all he could do. Even when the boy was small, he had almost no memory of holding him. The prince had a nurse, a tutor, a mother. The father's arms came last in that line, and most nights the dark came before his turn did.

The boy looked up. Their eyes met.

In those eyes the king always saw the same thing. It was not hatred. It was something thinner than that, and less sure. A weighing. Or a checking. Eyes that asked what is this man. That asked the father what a father was. A boy of fifteen, looking at his own father as though seeing him for the first time. Then, as if he had failed to make certain of something, the boy dropped his eyes to his plate again.

The king could not make sense of that checking look. Ambition, others would have said — the young prince already wanting the throne. And it was true that the boy had lately pressed to sit at council, to put his word in among the ministers, to harden his cheek when he was not heeded. Ambition. It looked like that.

But the king could not bring himself to see it as the face of ambition. Ambition's eyes look at the thing they want. His son's eyes seemed to look not at the thing he wanted but at the ground beneath his own feet — to be making certain the ground was really there.

The queen set down her spoon.

At the sound, the prince straightened. To each small motion of his mother's, the son answered. She set down, he set down; she took up, he took up. From the end of the table the father watched the matched breathing of the two of them. Between mother and son was a language he did not know — a language passed in the eyes alone, that he could not hear.

"How do you fare," the queen said.

She had raised her voice to reach the far end. They were words of care. But when words of care arrive from so far off, at so exact a pitch, they are no longer care. They are a rite. Not a wife's question to her husband, but a queen's appointed question to a king.

"Unchanged," the king answered.

That, too, was appointed. They traded the appointed question and the appointed answer across the two ends of the table. The servants of the hall were listening. They would witness that a question and an answer had been made. What was inside did not matter.

The queen's gaze rested on him a moment.

It was not coldness. Coldness still keeps the heat of feeling in it. Her gaze did not keep even that. When she looked at him she did not wear the eyes a person wears for a person. She wore the eyes she wore for the table, for the candlestick, for the wall. A thing that was there. A thing that could be moved. Or a thing that would, in time, have to be moved.

Under that gaze, the king remembered the smell of the bedchamber.

Cold, faintly sweet, close to metal. That smell and this gaze were the same thing. As the room waited for the crown, so the queen waited for the crown. Not for the face beneath it.

* * *

That night the king did not sleep.

Beside him the queen's back rose and fell in time. Asleep, or feigning it. He no longer cared to find out. He thought instead of one thing.

If I were gone tomorrow.

Who would be troubled, he wondered. The crown would remain. The throne would remain. The hand that pressed the seal would be taken up by another hand. The ministers would bow their heads to the new contents, and the table would be laid with the same number of plates. The queen — the queen, most likely, would not be troubled. Nor the son. If anyone were—

He could call up one face, and only one.

An old retainer. His name was Jonas. He had served the king since the king was a child, and had served the king's father, and his father before him — the last man of that line. He was long past the age when he might have laid down his office, but he would not lay it down. There was almost no place left for him in the court. The new ministers handled him like an old shadow, and the queen did not look at him so much as she looked at a candlestick.

That old man alone did not see the king as the king.

Jonas saw the king's face. Not the crown, but the tired face of the one man beneath it. When they passed in a corridor, there was always something in the old man's eyes that the king did not know. It was near to worry. But older than worry, and quieter — the far-seeing eyes of one who has watched over a thing for a long time.

Of late, those eyes had changed.

When Jonas saw the king now, he drew his brows together a little. He would begin to say a thing, and swallow it. Each time they passed in the corridor the old retainer would part his lips, and then close them. He was not searching for the words. He was holding them down.

The king did not yet know what it meant.

Not knowing, he looked up into the dark of the ceiling, and breathed the smell of the chamber, and counted the breaths of the back beside him. Cold, faintly sweet, close to metal. What the smell was, he still could not name.

He named it much later. In the mud, for the first time, he learned the name of that smell. It was the smell of a man being erased. The room had not been waiting for the crown. It had been waiting for the empty throne.