The king completes his circle of the lake. He’s decided to host the latest set of Dutch envoys offering a false peace. Back in the pleasure house proper, he sends his messenger down to the coast to invite their leadership to the royal court as guests of honor.
II.
Rutland walked in late to find Knox sitting on a stool, drinking palm whiskey in the living room. Before Knox could comment on the hour, Rutland set the Bible down over the brass rivets of the trunk, which had been pulled from the Ann, their captured frigate, twenty years ago by the Sinhalese. The spoils had spoiled, though. The rations were rancid and the clothing, stored in a separate compartment, had rotted not much differently from the meat. The Sinhalese had lost interest in the shrunken, sea-sodden box, and it was left to the two of them, Rutland and Knox, to discover its only remaining value, as furniture.
Knox leafed through the pages and his shipmate wondered if he would go through the same stages he himself had, now almost fifteen years ago, when the monk had given him the book: whether the surge of awe and gratitude would be overtaken by a stubborn sense of smallness.
But Knox’s eyes never lost their wideness. Immediately Knox’s father came to Rutland’s mind, the fevered one, delirious in his last days, talking mostly in Biblical snatches to his son and his earthly keepers, the two Sinhalese. They seemed to be the last fully formed sentences he possessed, at least the last of any complexity. It was as if their syntactic force, or else the depth of their entrenchment, had equipped them to crowd all else out of his mind. To Rutland this seemed an elevation of the Book at a cost to the man’s psyche, or else just the reverse.
He could see that Knox was also thinking of him, the old man endlessly apologizing for bringing his son along on this unholy “mission of exchange.” They were exchangers, Knox Sr. had said.
Sitting on the floor across from Knox, Rutland undid his boots, the leather rough and cracked. Knox started reading out passages of the Bible, lines his father had fixed on, near death and long before, back in England; lines he wanted to deliver now to his dead father, to Rutland, to all three of them. Each page was a trigger. On seeing the first few words, or even just the arrangement of the page, taking it in with a sweep of his eyes, the rest of the passage would follow like a stream. He would intone the words he saw in his mind, his eyes floating up to the other end of the house, the wall, the door, or the window, but never to Rutland.
Then he would turn a few of the supple vellum sheets — what merchant was missing this now? — take in another page, the flow and frame, and light on another line. Rutland hadn’t been much moved on seeing many of these lines himself, but he was moved by the effect they had on his friend.
Knox set the book down on the trunk and sat in silence. The flask of arrack shone in the light of the candle. Rutland took it to his lips but only a trickle of spirit remained, just enough to numb his tongue. Knox excused himself with a half-hearted wave, taking the Book with him into his room, which left Rutland to watch the tallow burn.
III.
Scabbarded men stood along the edges of the main hall, facing its walls like dunces in a room with too few corners. They’d each slipped a stopper out, eye-level and wide as a face. Through these gaps in the wall they looked out into the torch-lit court. Along the thick outer-court walls, in the hollow spaces scattered throughout, another set of men positioned themselves the same way, facing out into the broader village, where conversations were had, trade was conducted, life was lived.
Then there were the roamers, and sometimes he, Rajasingha, was one of them. Only the very closest to him knew. On these nights, his face was darkened a shade, and his locks, usually pristine, were made stringy and left to hang haphazardly around his ears, like an old warrior’s. The king would be clothed like the middling ranks of the court (he had several swords marked with the shields of modest nobility).
Only after he’d officially retired to his quarters, not long after dark, would he begin his walk. Two guards stood by his chamber doors as he wandered the court, the night’s gossip begun. He talked to no one, only listened, and if called out to, or interrupted, he pretended not to hear, and sometimes not to see.
His purpose was, primarily, ostensibly, security. From his watches and guards much intelligence came to him, but the mediation introduced impurities. Depending on the messenger, the information would be colored in one way or another, and this was not always, or even often, intentional.
He was sure there was much that was being misapprehended, when it wasn’t simply missed altogether. It wasn’t arrogance or vanity that made him think few of his officers could hope to see as he did. Keeping his kingdom alive this long, through the many years of tumult, coming from all directions, within and without, demanded an otherworldly sense for tone, for gesture: a capacity to see the future in things.
He didn’t acquire this sense through ruling. It came first, and it was what marked him as a ruler, the almost disinterested pleasure he took, even as a child, in understanding the effects of his actions: what would become, when he no longer needed a guardian and ascended to power, the ripples of his rule. A king had to take this relish, directed to no end, to stay king.
Nearly every night-walk shuffled the order of faith he had in the great nobles of the court. There were, in truth, many in the middle who neither rose nor fell much, being neither confidants nor traitors. But some near the lower margin, the threshold, would rise high up into safer territory, sometimes to a place that made them for a time unimpeachable. Others would fall from these heights to somewhere near the margin. The problem only occurred when a great man already near the margin fell, thereby crossing the threshold.
Reasons would then be found. When treason could be imputed, the execution was public. When the case was harder, a vanishing followed. Sometimes this was an exile; usually it was a private execution.
There were a very few cases, no more than half a dozen, where, owing to discoveries made about the man, usually during a later watch, either by the watchmen or the king himself on one of his night-walks, a noble who had fallen below the threshold would right the wrong that had caused the fall before it was feasible to have him disappeared or killed. Curiously, none of these men ever fell out of the king’s graces again.
Against the wishes of his aides, Rajasingha would pass the inner wall of the court and roam the village, a less manicured space, freer in form, centerless and so more hazardous. Here he would stroll through the lanes and splitting byways on which the village houses and markets were arranged. His stride would shorten, or he would pause altogether, and by his expression pretend to decide whether to enter a shop, say, or take a rest on a rock.
When they’d started these watches, soon after the rebellion, Rajasingha frequently heard unflattering things said about his rule. But open criticism soon disappeared after the watches began, as the Court always seemed to know what the people said or did, even in private.
Dissatisfaction fell away into code. A second language, compounded out of the first, in which hybrids of existing phrases, placed back to back, came to mean something else, took hold in the kingdom. Everyone was soon bilingual at least.
When this tongue drew notice — the watches grew bilingual too — these sentiments were shunted into gestures, looks. But from the many eyes of the king these were no safer. Use of these codes and gestures, when discovered, led to various sorts of seizures, always disguised, tailored to the circumstance, and laced with the moral significance, the cruel wit, of parables. A man’s yard might be taken for use by the state in the cultivation of a public garden, if he’d been found to have complained, in the wrong tones, about the condition of the village. Cattle might be led away on an alleged suspicion of disease — for the king’s use if they were grand, to slaughter and destruction otherwise — if the grievance concerned inadequate supplies of water or cattle feed, which were regulated by the councilors. Or a son might be conscripted for a servant’s role in the temple if a family’s objection was to the coziness between royals and monks.