A good portion of the audience looked about his age, and of the same background. Some of them must have undertaken watch-work themselves, for reasons like his own. They would know bits and pieces of the tale, even how some of those bits and pieces fit together, just as he did. Some might well know more.
It was a condition of getting the work, of course, that one concealed the fact, though some confidences would inevitably be made to intimates. And in fact these were calculated for by the agency. But most of the people here were, overtly at least, only intellectual colleagues, or would-be colleagues, and information of that kind, which would have shown them to be colleagues twice over, would not be exchanged, not least for the implication that one was reinforcing the very political order being worried, from all angles, by the Institute.
Kames’s introduction had been kind and Stagg was about to falsify it. His essays were not critiques, not in any clear sense, even to him. Or if they were, they transcended his intentions, not only his past ones, but the ones he had now, which seemed to extend no further than reading out the pages he’d brought with him.
Worse, these pages were ones Kames hadn’t reviewed. Stagg was taking a detour. Renna was right, the future of the Institute was uncertain now in ways deeper than its director could know. Deeper even than Stagg knew, probably. What he’d reported back to Penerin, of his last conversation with Kames, in the garden, had made his Second Watch supervisor cagey about his own plans in a way that was new to Stagg. Penerin probably had other information by then as well, perhaps from Ravan. Not that he was going to share all of it with Stagg. In truth, their dealings were only partly above board. Penerin told him only as much as he wanted to. Just like Kames. When matters got complicated, both his bosses turned elliptical.
The thing that was certain now was that a shift had occurred. By the time the elections came and went, there might well be no possibility of a Wintry fellowship left. Penerin’s evasions suggested as much. Their ambiguities had turned his words, like Kames’s, into a cryptic — or better, encrypted — poetry.
Now it was Stagg’s turn. Instead of the main essays, he’d brought only scattered appendices with him, bits that captured the tiniest flashes of light and no more. If the earlier pieces were shards, these were specks. But wasn’t it possible, he thought, that they reflected more, like a dust of diamonds? They felt realer to Stagg in their discreteness than the longer tableaus he’d assembled with such pain. Perhaps they managed to say more, in their compression, about him and his several selves, his family, and about history, than the rest of what he’d written, even if he was less sure he could fully survey their meaning. That was the problem, the virtue, of poetry. It outran you.
They might also achieve what any one of the essays could not. In the space of one lecture, the only one there might be now, he could still suggest a whole narrative, a destiny, this way. Because even dust could be shaped into a trail. What mattered was arrangement, order.
In fact he would be telling two stories at once, one about the past and another about the future. If he was betraying Kames in not delivering the more lucid lecture they’d agreed on, the one centered on the monk, he was also showing him a kindness. The trail would be an arrow. It would tell what Stagg knew about the circumstances, the tension, but without telling. The same way Kames liked to tell. From there, it would be up to him.
Though he wasn’t close to Kames, and didn’t especially trust him, he owed him something for giving him the chance to speak. More than that, there was kinship. Kames wasn’t wrong in thinking the country had reached a liminal moment in its history. Penerin and his kind wanted to deny this. They said everything could be recovered. But there were such things as faits accomplis. A world built around seducing the man in the street had managed to turn all the world out into that street. Now, almost everyone found the free world unlivable, chaotic, coarse. The invisible hand, Kames liked to say, turned out to have a very strong grip. It finally had all of them by the neck now, it seemed. Maybe he was right. It was time to lop it off.
Stagg unknotted the leather and pulled the small sheaf from the case. Tapping the pages on the edge of the lectern, he caught Kames’s eye, far in back and with his face already made up in a furrowed expression of concentration. He might have other things pressing on him just now. Stagg thought to say something that would suggest the change of plan. He thought to thank Kames. But no, both ideas might only corrupt the simple intention he had left, to read.
I.
Around that great table they sit in silence. Rajasingha’s attendants, noblemen in their own right, look on from a smaller table nearer the lake as the king takes his daily meal. So as not to contaminate the great man’s food, each wears a mask, sewn from the sun-bleached fibers of the coconut.
In all there are twenty dishes set out this afternoon: sambhur of the Highlands stewed in a thin, turmeric-laced gravy that is almost a broth; breadfruit garnished with cinnamon and lychees; river fish in a chili and cardamom curry; steamed pittu flecked with cashews, served with a tamarind sambal; fritters of rice-flour and jaggery; and fifteen besides. He will eat of only four or five of these.
The king makes a faint gesture toward the pot of boiled jack-fruit and lime. The nobleman closest ladles it onto a corner of the banana leaf from which the king is eating slowly, methodically, alone. Today’s meal is unusual only in that it is taken by Lake Kilara, at the royal retreat, the pleasure house. He’s here three or four times a year, usually for a few days only. The makeshift palace in newly royal Digligy, and in fact his very grip on the country, is under muted and perpetual threat. A populist rebellion forced him from the palace in Nillemby, westward into the mountains. And the Dutch have been making incursions eastward into the heart of the island, from Colombo, ever since making landfall on the southwestern coast four decades ago, around 1640. The twin forces have made Digligy his home and Lake Kilara his refuge.
The king finishes his meal and dismisses the others, who make their way beneath the overhanging lattice from the gazebo to the main complex. The noble servants, unmasked now, as the king has finished, take away the dishes. This will be their meal. He steps from the gazebo to the banks, thinking of the evening’s return to the palace. The sun has made a mirror of the lake. Dressed in a white tunic embroidered in red, his scabbard once again at his side, he begins to circle the lake, turning over the options.
Van Holten had said the Dutch forces stationed near Colombo were mounting a fresh campaign to capture the Highlands and the kingdom, that their flatteries, of defending His shores from the Portuguese, had always been hollow, from the time they’d arrived. The possibility now occurs to the king of making the Dutch, after all these years, finally mean what they say, by bringing them into a more profound conflict than they intend with their European brethren, the Portuguese, the kind that might weaken each enough to flush them both from the island.
The information had not been offered up of Van Holten’s will exactly. The king had first seen the soldier chained and starved outside the royal court, alongside other European captives. He’d been left behind by a retreating Dutch squad led by one Commander Haas. Only after weeks of being kept like this, exposed alternately to withering heat and violent rain, was Van Holten brought before Rajasingha. He was offered a peasant’s meal and some shade and that was the end of it. He told what he knew.