Calyxa had dressed herself, under Mrs. Comstock’s tutelage, in the blouse and skirt of a modest Aristo. She wore the clothes unwillingly, but they were becoming to her, although she picked at the belt that cinched her waist as if it were some medieval implement of torture. “This is not exactly how I expected to spend my honeymoon,” she remarked.
I began to apologize, but she waved it off. “It’s all very interesting, Adam, if slightly terrifying. Is Julian really in mortal danger?”
“Almost certainly. His father was killed by Deklan Conqueror as punishment for achieving exactly the sort of notoriety Julian has just acquired. There are limits to what even a President can do, of course—the contending forces of the Army and the Dominion are practical constraints, Sam says—but Deklan is devious and may bide his time until some scheme occurs to him.”
“Is there anything we can do to help?”
“In strategizing, no—that’s best left to the Aristos, who understand how these things work. In practical matters, Julian knows he can count on us.”
“Much of the blame, of course, lies with this Theodore Dornwood.”
“If there’s any justice he’ll be made to pay for his thievery and lies.”
“Is there, though? Any justice, I mean?”
I took this as a practical rather than a philosophical question. “There will be, if I can help it.”
“You mean you intend to punish him yourself?”
“Yes,” I said, and meant it, though I hadn’t given the prospect much thought. Perhaps Deklan Comstock couldn’t be brought to justice, unless at the Final Judgment; but Theodore Dornwood was no Aristo, and he didn’t live in a walled palace, and it might be within my power to extract some sort of payment from him.
I vowed that I would do so, sooner or later.
* I beg the reader’s pardon.
2
“Any outdoor game or sport,” Julian said, “to be a sport, ought to have three essential qualities. It should be difficult, it should be impractical, and it should be slightly silly.” His father had taught him that interesting truth, he said.
It was our second week at Edenvale. There had been no word or signal from Deklan Comstock, and the furor in the press had begun to die down for lack of supplemental fuel. Perhaps that engendered a premature sense of security among us.
Certainly Edenvale was a soothing locality. I had never summered at an Aristo’s country Estate, unless you count tending stable for the Duncans and the Crowleys, and I was appalled and seduced by the luxury and laziness of it. Edenvale’s properties were not cultivated, but kept in the wild condition. Trails were maintained for Scenic Strolling or Riding, and the vast acreage of wilderness invited hunting and exploration.
Edenvale House itself sat on an immaculately-tailored lawn bordered with flower gardens. During pleasant weather we took breakfast outdoors, the meal catered to us by servants while we sat at dainty whitewashed tables. On rainy days Calyxa and I explored the seemingly endless rooms of the House, or perched in its library, which was stocked with nineteenth-century classics and Dominion-approved novels of light romance. In the evenings Sam broke out a deck of cards, and we pursued the diversions of Euchre or Red Rose until bedtime; or we adjourned to the music room, where Mrs. Comstock was teaching herself to play Las Ojos Criollos on the piano.* In palmier days, Julian explained, the house might have been crowded with visiting Aristos and Owners and Senators and such. But the hanging of Bryce Comstock had cast a shadow over the family, and Mrs. Comstock had been shut out from the elite social circuit. Since then her companions had been drawn from the Manhattan show business crowd, or from the lower ranks of rising wealth; and Edenvale was not the social magnet it once had been.
After two weeks these small entertainments began to pall, and Julian proposed taking me on a tour of the wilder parts of the Estate—the Estate as he had known it as a child, before he was sent to Williams Ford. I readily agreed, and we set out from the house on a sunny, cool morning. Julian carried an unusual piece of luggage with him: a canvas bag, narrow, and about three feet long. I asked him about it; and that was when he quoted his father’s remark about the nature of sport.
“Is it sporting equipment of some kind, then?”
“Yes, but I’ll keep the nature of it to myself for now—I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.”
We had dressed in clothes not much grander than what we had worn in Williams Ford when we hunted squirrels in the forest; and this was a relief after the complex and constraining Aristo fashions into which we had recently been belted and braced. A breeze turned the leaves of the ailanthus and the birch trees as we walked beneath their overarching branches, and it was as if we had become young again, for a few hours, at least.
In Williams Ford such expeditions always put Julian in a philosophical mood. That hadn’t changed. We paused in a grove of cork trees to refresh ourselves from the canteens we had packed, and Julian said, “This is where I learned to love the past, Adam—as a boy, this was my private Tip.”
“More trees than treasure, as far as I can tell.”
“So it was meant to be. But all this forest has grown up over layers of scuttle from the days of the Secular Ancients. Dig anywhere and you’re bound to unearth an old spoon or button or bone. Over that way”—he pointed at a hillside lush with birch and blackberry—“over that way there are foundations cut into the slope, and the remains of tumble-down houses. Do you know what I found there, as a boy?”
“Beetles? Spiders? Poison ivy?”
“All those; but more importantly—books!”
“You loved books so early, did you?”
“Even when I didn’t know what they meant. The books I found were mostly foul and water-damaged, but here and there a readable page was preserved. I didn’t just read those fragments, Adam, I nearly memorized them. It was a peculiar delicious feeling just to hold them in my hand—as if I’d found a way to eavesdrop on a conversation that faded into the air a hundred years ago.”
“What sort of books were they?”
He shrugged. “Novels, mostly. Stories of intimate relations, or murder, or fantasies of flying to the stars or traveling in time.”
“Not Dominion-approved, of course.”
“No, and therein lay half the pleasure. The fruit was forbidden but it was sweet, even when it surpassed my understanding. What it told me was that the history the Dominion teaches is partial at best. The Dominion’s truth is built on a cracked foundation, and buried in the cracks are things of immense interest and great beauty.”
“Dangerous things,” I said, though I was intrigued by the idea of stories about traveling in time and other such abominations.
“Truth is a perilous commodity,” Julian admitted, “but so is ignorance, Adam—more so.”
“Are we going to see those ruined buildings, then?”
“Everything valuable I took away from them long ago. No,” Julian said, “today we’re going fishing.”
So saying, he led me another half-mile through a stand of birch and ailanthus to a lake—a glass-flat blue oval in the woods, its banks choked with goosegrass and purple loosestrife. Julian began to unroll his bundle, which I assumed would contain the rods and reels necessary for fly-fishing. But it did not.
We fished from kites, instead.
The kites—a pair of them—were of a design I hadn’t seen before: a wedge of silk with stubby “wings” and a vent in the lower quadrant, supported by three parallel sticks of supple lathing. The kite thus conformed was not rigid, but was what Julian called a “parafoil.” When lofted into the wind it opened like a sail, and was very stable in the air, and did not dip and bob like the crude kites I had made as a child, or fly upside-down, or plummet to the earth without warning. Julian sent his kite aloft first, to give me the idea, though the business wasn’t complicated. Left to itself, the kite was stable enough that it hung in the sky as if riveted there by the gentle breeze. By tugging the string or running the reel Julian could make the kite rise or descend, or travel left and right, according to his will.