The King's Shadow Has No Limits

Avram Davidson

THE KING'S SHADOW HAS NO LIMITS

The Late Renascence historian known as Pannonicus had written that ‘The names of nations are often changed; the names of rivers, never.” Had he contented himself with observing that the names of nations changed more often than those of rivers, his comment would have been more correct. The names of the Triune Monarchy of Scythia-Pannonia-Transbalkania had been officially adopted only in the fifth year of the Reign of the present Monarch; the name of the Ister is found on the earliest maps; The so-called Addendum to Procopius quotes a Fragment of Tacitus, now lost, to the effect that "The river of the Galans flows into the Ister,” and so forth. Gaul, Gael, Galan, Galicia, Gallego, Galatia, all mark the marches of that once-widespread people, whose languages are now spoken only in the highlands and islands of the misty Atlantic. The lesser of the two streams on whose banks came into being the great City of Bella still bears, officially, the name of the Gallants . . . but to every nonscholar in the Capital of the Triune Monarchy it is and only is the Little Ister.

For a long time the lower part of this stream, particularly where it

flowed through the South Ward, had been a little better than an open sewer; now, however, it was announced, “The Council and Corporation of the City of Bella”—a phrase which lacked, somehow, quite the majesty of, say, Senatus 'populusque Romanus—was going to embark upon a twofold program of flood control and beautification in regard to the lesser river: and this project was to be dedicated as a birthday present to His Royal and Imperial Majesty, Ignats Louis. With a certain degree of caution, it had not been made clear which birthday it was going to commemorate. The King-Emperor, in no great period of time, would be eighty-two.

Some alteration to adjoining property was, of course, inevitable; and one-property owner, a parvenu brewer, had been gauche enough to protest The law books had been opened wide enough to acquaint him with the law of eminent domain, and then slapped shut in his face, so to speak; whilst the slap was still echoing, the Court of First Jurisdiction had seen fit to add, perhaps as obiter dicta, the old saying, “The Kings shadow has no limits. . .

Doctor Eszterhazy, one fairly fine day, thought that he would go and have a look at the work in progress. He did not take any of his carriages, and neither did he take the steam runabout—the last time he had taken his steam runabout into the South Ward, an aggressive drunkard had staggered up and insisted on being supplied with twopennyworth of roasted chestnuts. Eszterhazy took the tram.

The rains that spring had been less than usual, and this portended trouble for the farmers’ crops, and, eventually, for the poor, to whom even a rise of . . . say, two pennies ... in the price of a commodity meant tragedy. But even this much drought made work on the Little Ister easier: a series of dams had, first reduced the flow to a trickle, and then—the last one—cut it off entirely. Where the old stream had in freshet inundated slums and junkyards, an enormous excavation was now preparing the way for a tree-lined pool. Exactly how much the poor would appreciate this park was not yet certain, but certainly they must have appreciated the great increase in employment which the project afforded. It would have been most ungrateful if they had not, for this did more than merely supply them with wages, it helped “dissipate unrest,” as the Gazette newspaper reminded its readers . . . few of whom were likely to be seeking employment on the project, however.

Eszterhazy, more or less by osmosis, progressed through the crowd over the Swedish Bridge (it had once been crossed by Charles XII, fleeing the Turks, among whom he had found brief refuge after fleeing the Russians), and eventually found a place on the railing. He seemed to be looking down upon an anthill which had roughly broken open.

“Unrest” there certainly was in more than usual quantity. The Royal Pannonian Government had again refused Slovatchko-language rights to the Slovatchko minority in the schools of Avar-Ister, capital of Pan- nonia, whilst vigorously insisting upon an extension of Avar-language rights for the Avar-speaking minority in the schools of Bella: the Serbians, as usual, had been far from slow in pointing out that such a situation would never arise in a (projected) Kingdom of the Serbians, Slovatchkoes, and Dalmatians. The Romanou had revived their old practice of driving swine to market through the Turkish and Tartar sections of the towns; the regular routes would have been shorter, but it would not have been as much fun. The Concordat with the Vatican was shortly due for its quinquennial confirmation, and the Byzantine Delegates in the Diet were again announcing that, if it were confirmed, they would vote against the Budget. The grain merchants, in anticipation of a shortage, had already begun to hoard supplies. And the Hyperboreans were again refusing to pay their head-tax.

Long lines of men reached from the bottom of the excavation to its top, and were passing up leathern buckets of dirt from hand to hand. Steam shovels would have been quicker, but there were only twelve or so of these smoking monsters in all of Bella, whereas the number of the underemployed was beyond count. Some of the workers, had they belonged to a class higher in the social scale, would have been still in school. Others must certainly have had wives and children to support. A surprising number were quite on in years, and one of these for some reason kept repeatedly attracting Eszterhazy’s attention; an old, old man, white-haired and -bearded, clad in tatters, who moved slowly to receive his bucket of dirt, strained to maintain it, slowly turned to pass it on. Again and again the eyes of the watcher returned to this single figure, though he could not have said why.

It took less time to withdraw from the railings of the bridge than it had to get to them. Eszterhazy crossed over to the south side, wandered a while through the mazy little streets where the fishwives were forever slapping herring on the chopping-blocks and hoarsely shouting, “A penny off! A penny off!” and came back again within sight of the work. Slowly, slowly, the sides of the great pit were being peeled back at an angle, the dirt tossed down into a huge heap. The heap itself was in constant flux, shovels moving it continually to several points, whence by buckets it slowly moved to the top and into the wagons which carried it off, he did not know where. The men in the bucket brigade swayed to and fro, from side to side. The leathern containers moved up, up, up. When they had been emptied, they were tossed down into the pit again.

Eszterhazy’s eyes were seeking something . . . someone. . . . He had not realized whom until he found him once again. He was nearer, this time, and in a moment or two, he realized what it was about the ragged old man which had been attracting his gaze.

For some reason, the old toiler reminded him of the old Emperor. And this brought him a recollection of some words of Augustine about astrology: of two men known to him, whose births, having occurred upon an estate “where even the births of puppies were recorded/’ were known to have been under the same sign at the same hour and minute —yet one grew up to inherit the estate, and the other toiled on “without the yoke of bondage being lifted for a moment. . .” The reflection disturbed him. Had the old man been near, he would have given him alms; as it was . . .

He boarded the tram which had taken him to South Ward, but—on impulse—got off quite a ways before his home stop. He had seen a crowd where crowds were not usually to be seen, and he walked across the street and into the square where it was. He saw an old, neglected- looking church and the high iron palings and tottering tombstones of a neglected churchyard. People were swarming in and out. An old woman, her bosom covered with a tattered sack, hurried past him, one hand clutched tightly upwards as though to contain and protect; behind her another old woman, and an old man, and a youngish woman, and a child—all in sackcloth and all with expressions of great wonder and all with a clutched fist.

“What is it that you all have there, Mother?” he asked one. She shot him a look of resentful astonishment, and said, as she hurried by, “Dust of Saint Dominik. . . .”

“Ahhh . . he murmured. All was now clear. He made his way through the church and into the churchyard. The throng was clustered round a tomb of incredibly antique design; it had been whitewashed, and a number of priests were standing next to it. One was scraping the side of the tomb with a short knife of exactly the sort which painters use to remove old paint before putting on a fresh coat. A second priest gathered the powder in a paper, and, when the first paused, transferred it to a bowl, whence a third spooned it up, tiny spoon by tiny spoon – the fourth and last priest stood a slight bit apart, reading aloud from the Psalter.

Two men, evidently the verger and the sexton, allowed the pilgrims to approach the tomb one by one, each knelt, and (presumably) prayed a moment, arose, held out a hand, received a tiny spoonful of dust, withdrew. This, then, was the somewhat famous tomb of Saint Domenicus Paleologus, a younger son of a cadet branch of the Imperial House of Byzantium. His missionary labors had included the free treatment of the sick; so great his reputation, that his very tomb had repeatedly been, and literally, tom to pieces in order that the hallowed fragments might prove medically utile. At length the ecclesiastical authorities had fenced and walled the Saints last resting-place: the present ceremony was already hundreds of years old; once a year the dust was scraped from the tomb and distributed. Doubtless the ceremony had been fashionable, but not for long years now; those clustering here and straining for the puissant dust were all from the poor.

The pious rich had other places.

The bell began to ring in the church tower, a flock of doves wheeled up and around, the crowd set up a melancholy howl, pressed closer round the priests at the tomb, who began to move faster and faster. The ceremony was coming to its conclusion. In front of Eszterhazy was an old man dressed in blue canvas, worn soft, worn full of holes, scarcely in any better condition than the remnant of a sack which he had about his back and shoulders. The aged supplicant knelt, received his bit of dust, hastily spooned out, had begun to hobble away—when a heavy old woman, perhaps a fishwife by the sound and smell of her, hurrying so as not to miss out, fell full against him. The hand he had clenched fell out, fell open, in a second was empty.

The old man gazed at his empty hand, still lightly covered by the dust of lime, with stupefaction. He hooted once, twice, in grief and senile disbelief, turned as though to return for another portion, was pushed back, pushed aside. Tears ran from his rufous eyes into his snowy beard. Then, with a sudden and unexpected movement, he plunged his head forward, tongue out, and licked the dust adhering to his hand. Then he tottered away, and Eszterhazy tried to follow after him. But the press was too great.

The last toll of the bell echoed in the air, the last spoon of dust was distributed from the bowl, the priest with full deliberateness lifted the bowl and smashed it, and the unsatisfied remnant of the crowd gave voice to one more howl of sorrow. . . .

The ceremony was over.

As fast as he could, as soon as he could, Eszterhazy scuttled from the churchyard, his eyes darting everywhere around the square. He darted, first up one street, then back to the square and then up another—all, all in vain. The old man was not to be seen, was nowhere to be seen.

Old man whose face was the face of the old man who was Emperor.

Eszterhazy at last sat down in a low dramshop, ordered cognac. The rough, pale spirit in the dirty glass had never been to France, had been nowhere near France. No matter. He sipped, then he gulped. Then he coughed, choked. Then he made himself be calm and still, and he made himself reflect, there in the stifling room with the rough concrete walls and the flies and the stench from the privy in the nearby yard.

First he forced himself to consider what might have been the state of his own mind, to have created this sudden obsession with every white- bearded old man he saw had the Emperors face . . . then he reproached himself for the exaggeration: still: two, in little over an hour s time. . . . Briefly, he considered protesting this last ceremony to the cardinal-archbishop, to the Minister of Cults; decided not to; in the six centuries which had passed since the death of St Domenicus Paleologus (himself close kin to an Emperor) the ceremony had been repeatedly—and uselessly—forbidden: now, at least, it was reduced to one hour, once a year; no one nowadays was injured . . . and, perhaps, he thought, wryly, the lime content of the dust might be of some mild use to the body!

But, back to his own state of mind—certainly, he had been increasingly, if somewhat unconsciously, uneasy about the state of the nation. And to him, as to almost everyone else, the Emperor was the nation. Had he not been uneasy, too, about the state of the aged Emperors health? Did not every report of even a cold send ripples of uneasiness throughout the land, cause prayers, most of them genuine, to be offered for old Bobbo’s health? So it was perhaps not a completely unreasonable thing if he had seen his Sovereigns face in the face of other old men who suffered. . . . He suddenly sat up. Suppose (his heart thumped) suppose it was not an illusion! Suppose—could it be possible!—that it was Ignats Louis himself whom he had seen? The first old man, laboring in the pit—no, that was impossible, he could not have had the strength; that one had been too far off for him to have been sure. But this other, this second one? The pouched, protruding and reddened eyes, the bifurcated beard, the long nose, the very stoop and gait? Could the Emperor have suddenly taken a notion to play Haroun al-Rashid and go about incognito to take the pulse of the city, so to speak? This pilgrimage just now over, for instance . . .

For although the King-Emperor reigned and lived in an age of telephones and gramophones and motor-cars, he had been bom in an age when the steamboat was only a toy on a pond. Bom to an obscure princeling in a house—not even a castle—on the Gothic-Slovatchko border-marches, deep in the forest, raised in infancy and early childhood not by nannies, mademoiselles, frauleins, but according to antique custom by his wet nurse in her own cottage. What tales of ages even earlier yet had he heard day after day and night after night? He had already had his first beard when destiny, in the form of a court circle alarmed at the growing insanity of the then-emperor, had plucked him from the hunting lodge and the wilderness and sent him to military school—their idea and their only idea of how to fit the Heir for the heavy task ahead.

Small wonder that religious eccentrics of all sorts, not to say outright charlatans, were able to find access, increasingly as his hearing diminished, to his ancient ear; yes, it just might be possible that he had of his own mere whim and fancy decided to participate in the now- brief pilgrimage for the Dust of Saint Dominik. One might find out.

One would have to. . . .

He had by this time left the dramshop and, wandering about in a deep study, marked not his steps, and, looking up, found himself, as the bells tolled noon, at another of the scenes continued from ancient ages: the distribution of the Beggars’ Dole. Only a single arch of heavy masonry remained to mark the location of the City Gates. Down to the early years of the present Reign, the Imperial Capital had remained a walled city, its gates literally locked at sunset, the keys ceremonially handed over to the Emperor to keep till shortly before dawn. The city had since spread far and wide, the walls for the most part demolished. But the City Gates remained—or, at any rate, one of the arches of the Main Gate still remained. And at this spot, where once assembled the lame, the halt, the blind, the pauper and the leper, to beg for alms, at this same place forever commemorated in living legend and in folklore, each noon the ancient beneficence of bread and milk was still distributed.

Slowly the line of recipients moved forward. Doubtless there were no longer any lepers among them. Even the standards of raggedness had improved. There were a few more old women than old men, sh ufflin g forward to accept the mug of milk and the chunk of bread from the ‘one friar, one sister, and one knight” traditionally charged with the duty. The “knight” was usually a very junior member of The Household—Eszterhazy did not know him. Eszterhazy drew near. The two policemen on duty looked at him indifferendy, yawned. Eszterhazy examined the recipients one by one. Why? Absurd! What did it matter? Ahah, a Tartar—few to be seen nowadays. . . . This next one still in fragments of the old-style costume of the sailing-bargees. . . . This one a Goth. . . . The next . . .

So. Yes. In shapeless coat, rags wrapped about shuffling feet, cap tom in two places, bread in one hand and milk in the other, with dim purpose heading for the worn old steps at the side to sit and eat and drink: if this was not Himself the King-Emperor, it was no one else. Only a sudden flash of memory of the fatal identification of Louis and Marie Antoinette by the innocent priest at Varennes—some dim caution flaring up—prevented Eszterhazy from bowing, from kneeling. But he was sufficiently taller than the sunken, shrunken figure to justify bending, and he made of this merely physical motion an act of homage; he inclined his head as he said, softly, “Sire.”

The old eyes, rheumy and filmed, looked at him. The old head nodded, twice. The old hands started to dip the bread in the milk, paused. The old man slowly crossed himself. Once again the bread went towards the mug; once again it stopped.

“Long, long ago,” he said, in his high, now somewhat tremulous voice, “a delegation of the Jewish notables came to see me, to thank me for something or other. And I—may God forgive me, I was young then —there was a rabbi among them, and I said to him jovial, I said, ‘And is your Messiah here?’ God forgive me, God forgive me. . . . And he looked at me, this old man who had looked as it were on Pharaoh, and this is what he said, ‘Do not seek him here. Seek him among the sickly beggars at the City Gate.’ ” Again the bread went towards the milk, this time it went in, came up dripping, and with dexterous haste he caught the sop and took it in his mouth before, sodden, it could fall.

Eszterhazy said nothing. The old man munched and sucked and swallowed. It did not take him long to be done with the refreshment. Then he said, “God has given this weary old body such length of days so that this Empire and its many nations might have some few more years of peace, you see. What did the old France say? He said, ‘After him the deluge. . . . And the Deluge swept away his House.’ But, now, after me, after me . . . what? Tell me, learned fellow, what was the name of that old empire which in olden days sank beneath the sea?”

“Sire: Atlantis,”

“Yes, so. After me, this Empire will sink like Atlantis, and the children of these children,” he gestured to a few boys and girls playing near off, “will look for it upon the maps in vain.” He was long silent Then, in a whisper of a whisper, “Sed Dea spes mea .”

When Eszterhazy raised his head, the place beside him was empty.

Up and down and back and forth through the andentmost quarters of the City, Eszterhazy sought his Sovereign: what his Sovereign was seeking, he did not know.

A voice close by said,

The day wore to its close; he found his way to his home. A while he spent in thought; then he thought to send a message; then he got up and went to his telephone. The number he announced was one of two digits and below fifty: the call went through immediately.

‘The Equerries’ Room,” a voice said. What emotions could he imagine in the voice? Best to imagine none.

“Pray ask Count Kristofr Eszterhazy if he will speak with his cousin, Doctor Engelbert”

Almost at once the familiar voice, “Yes, Engli, what? . . .”

“Kristi, forgive the presumption, but . . . but, how is it with The Presence?”

A short silence, heavy breathing. Then; “Engli, you frighten me— how could you have known?”

He felt his heart swell. “What? What?” he mumbled.

‘‘We thought he had fainted, he was unconscious for most of the day, he seemed to be saying something from time to time, it made no sense, ever; things like, oh, TIow heavy is the dirt,' maybe—or, ‘Quick, quick, the dust,’ or, The dole/ and ‘Is he here?’ But he was mostly silent— all day long 1 . We feared the worst, no one but the doctors were allowed in, and of course no one was allowed out But about an hour ago he suddenly regained consciousness. The doctors say that he is as well now as he was yesterday. So we must say: Thank God.”

The call was soon ended.

—What had happened? Was it possible? Had he, Engelbert Esz- terhazy, suffered and shared in suffering an hallucination of the most fantastic kind conceivable? Dreamed, constructed an entire phantasm out of the depths of his own mind—a phantasm which . . . somehow, somehow ... in some way seemed to fit in with the phantasm of this other and so much older man, lying motionless on his hard bed halfway across the City? Incredible as this was, still, it was the likeliest explanation. The likeliest—which may not have been the best and truest . . .

... or had some . . . some aspect of the aged Monarch left its fleshly mansion, and, as the Kaffirs of Africa said, gone wandering about whilst the body slept ... or ... or what?

Long, long he pondered the matter, pacing back and forth in his study, back and forth.

At length, longing for fresher air, he went up to the roof of his house. It stood on no great hill, but stand upon a hill it did: all, all about him, on every side, the Imperial capital lay spread out to his view, gas and electric lamps in streets and houses; and with naphtha and acetylene flares as well, where the markets were: necklaces and pendants and clusters, a coffer full of jewels spread out before him. And above, every tower and crenelation and door and gate of the Casde on the bluffs above the glittering, reflective Ister was illuminated.

He heard, over and over again, in his mind, as though even now spoken next his ear, the words which either the aged Sovereign or else his very simulacrum or doppelganger had said. “After me, this Empire will sink like Atlantis, and the children of these children will look for it upon the maps in vain . ...”

And he asked himself, again and again: Could these words be true? Dare he even think they might be true?

Below, all about, the lights dwindled. Above, the stars wheeled. And then came the mists from the river. And then the cold wind.

It was with great pride that I published Richard Christian Matheson’s first professional short story. His fiction is understandably influenced by that of his famous father, Richard Matheson, but it certainly heads into its own directions as well. Advertising copywriter, teacher of creative writing, screenwriter, and currently completing his first novel, Richard is a true creator and herein takes to its inevitable conclusion the business of scientific research and organ donors.