Bastard to the Crown

Bastard to the Crown
by
Bobby Derie

1346

There was a hamlet, on the road to Crécy. A hundred souls and twice as many pigs. The English had fought and burned their way through France, but their train marched in silence through that place. There was no smoke, for the embers of night-fires had died out in the hearths; and the cows lowed that wanted the knowing hands and the milk-pail. The dogs did not bark, for every furry throat had been cut; and the families lay a-tangle in blood and bowels in their own beds. The children looked like sleeping angels who had their haloes removed with an axe.

There was great talk at all this, though the columns did not slow the march. Some companies sent out to round up beer and animals told of a bloody trail in the mud and grass from house to house, and gore-stained weapons left discarded where they fell, broken and useless from toil. Among the camp followers, looters and whores who prized off shoes and sewing needles whispered how the corpses on the western side of town were stiff, while those on the east were supple and fresh. Of a pair of lovers run through with a sword as the lay in a bed of straw, and how the same stable held a good stallion, which a captain added to his train.

It was a single line in the chronicle of war. Then came Crécy, and that tide of noble blood washed out all memory of the hamlet on the road. Some later day, the bodies were discovered and received burial by the French, who cursed the English.

*

1483

They were 12 and 9, well-formed English boys with flowing locks, pale skin, and crooked teeth. The knight bore no sigil save a broken cross beneath a crown, and spoke not a word as he gave them their cloaks and led them from the room. The princes learnt more of the secret ways of the Tower in that final hour than all the months they had lived as prisoners in that castle. In some quiet tunnel miles away they rested, as the knight looked forward and back for pursuit. The Thames dripped from the wall and ceiling, and Edward held his cloak over Richard, who had sniffled at the cold and the damp.

When the knight returned, it was with a naked blade in one hand.

No one else heard their screams, or their prayers.

*

1888

Thomas was old, but there was still strength in his hands and arms, and he had worked his blade with purpose and skill. The fogs of London were thick and choking compared to the mists of Scotland; they reeked of cheap gin and offers of cheaper quim, but they had not turned his head from his purpose. They had allowed him four, to cover the deed, and he had done a proper bit of work. A tide of blood to cover the whiff of scandal, and it had worked. It was, he thought, the last that Thomas would do to honor the crown and broken cross. Then he saw the man waiting for him as he went to board the coach to Glamis, and Thomas allowed himself a smile.

When he did not return, they walled off his room, and never spoke of him again.

*

1999

She laid down the file, manila stuffed with vellum and foolscap pale against the dark skin of her hand.

“Why me?” The streets of London echoed in her voice.

“Malum necessarium.” Her handler touched his moustache. “Britain still needs bastards.”

He set a small badge before her, all shiny black and white, of a crown over a broken cross.

“There is a situation in Kosovo. It will provide cover for your initial assignment. Your blooding, if you care about the tradition of it all.” He brought out a thinner folder, and set it next to the badge. “A small village, near the war zone.”

###

Pathworking

Pathworking
by
Bobby Derie

“Close your eyes.” The master said, and I let go my sight.

“Find a position that is comfortable for you to sit.”

I did not exactly loll in the chair, but placed my feet flat on the floor and held my hands before me on my knees, palms curled inward.

“Relax your feet, your legs.”

I felt the muscles in my calves unbunch, made fists with my toes inside my shoes and then let them lie still.

“Feel the tension in your core, your back, your chest, and let it go. Breathe it out.”

The chair took my weight, and in the darkness behind my eyes I felt how tight and stretched my flesh seems on me, the heaviness on my bones. I let out the breathe I hadn’t been holding, felt like the balloon when the air hissed out of it.

“Relax your shoulders, your arms. Feel the weight on your neck, your head, and let it find its own level.”

My shoulders didn’t quite droop or sag, but I felt a dead weight then, a limp thing of sticks and rags held up under gravity. I was emptied out.

“Now relax your head. Feel the muscles of your face, your brow, around your mouth. Let them relax, and breath. Imagine every time you breath out, some of the tension goes with it.”

Breathe.

“You are on a beach, at night, and the moon is full. Look around you.”

Pink sand on a gentle slope, the jungle close by—vibrant streaks of color against dark waxy greens and browns, like every tree and flower was a poisonous toad warning things away. The sea looked warm and grey-green, and carried the moon’s wavy twin.

“Know this place. Become familiar with it. Know that you will always be able to return here, whenever you need to.”

I stood up, took a few steps on the beach. The dark tide drew near, the little things that scuttled in the surf playing at the legs of my chair where it was being drawn into the sand. I moved farther up the beach, where the tide did not reach.

“Now I want you to draw something in the sand.”

My knees thudded into dry sand, and I surveyed the blank canvas. I stretched out a finger, scrawled a crude R, hesitated. I drew out the long stroke to forge an L, a runic Y out of that, and so on until I had made a logogram, projections off of a single line, headed by a rounded sickle-crook.

“In your own time, in your own fashion, come back from that place. It waits for you, when you wish to visit it again.”

Looking around one last time, I took in the moon and its illusory twin, the dark jungle and darker sand, and the symbol sketched into the skin of the world. There was a breeze that carried sharp scents—salt, dying fish, sticky-sweet fruit and fresh-crushed green things. I sat back on the chair, the tide sucking at my ankles, and sank back down into the real world again.

###

My Name is Hank

My Name is Hank
by
Bobby Derie

“…and I beat my wife.”

The other six men looked at him, without speaking. The hulking psychologist with the green ponytail hid his lap with his clipboard.

“It was…years ago. I wasn’t quite myself that night. I mean, I…” Hank gritted his teeth, ran a big hand through his blond Harvard clip. “I don’t want to excuse it. I don’t want to say it wasn’t my fault. It was. I hit Jan. I hit her. I just wasn’t…it’s complicated.”

Hank stopped to breath, felt his heart beat, looked around again. The man on the far left looked like a shaved gibbon, sad eyes deep set in a head full of pink scar tissue. When he leaned forward you could see the radio bracelet around his ankle.

The green ponytail harrumphed, nudged his glasses farther up his nose.

“Go on, Hank.”

Hank gripped the podium, careful not to break it.

“I think, looking back on it, there was a lot of things working on me. I have a high-stress job, and I had been feeling inadequate for quite some time. Working together in a close-knit team, all sorts of danger, you get a good feel for how everyone contributes. The thing is, I may not be a slouch, but the other people on the team were something else. I tried…different things, y’know, to compensate. Bulked up you might say. Started dressing and acting more aggressively, tried to work harder to prove I could pull my weight.”

“Jan was supportive. Really, she was great. Went along with everything, just to keep me happy. But she…everything had come so easier to her. She was an heiress, never had to work for much of anything in her life, but she was also brilliant in her own way, when she put her mind to it. She spent more on shoes than I spent on my entire wardrobe, but when she wants something she goes for it. Like her dad, really. And for a while she wanted me, and so…”

Hank felt his face flush, the heat burning from his cheeks.

“She pursued me. All that money, all that energy, and she came after me hard. Then she had me and…she was satisfied. That was it. I was like another possession to her. So I had my research, and she had me. Literally, had me. Her daddy’s money paid for everything. So when I started my work with the team, really trying to make a difference, that caught her attention. She came along, and she did well at it. As well as I did at it.”

“And that was…I think there were things there we weren’t telling each other, even then. Maybe she liked the adventure of it all. Maybe she wanted to make a different, or just to stay close to me. But I was struggling so hard, to keep up, to prove myself to the group, and there she was, doing just as well as I was, and…I was jealous. I started to hate her a little bit. I mean, really I hated me. I hated that I was so weak, and I looked at her, doing so well, without going through what I was doing, not making the mistakes I was making…and I loved her, but I was tied to her, her money, her daddy’s money which paid for everything. I wasn’t with her because of her money, but it wasn’t like I was bringing in enough to support us.”

Next to the scarred ape-face there was a carrot-top, dark sunglasses and a cane. He looked meticulously clean; dressed down in jeans and a polo shirt and high tops, but the tan lines were wrong—high collars and low sleeves that spoke of long days in suits. Hank looked at the scarred hands, the cane. Wondered which he might have used against her.

“So I had…a break. It’s hard to really describe it, even now. I wasn’t acting like myself, but I was doing the sort of things that I wanted to do. I was still me. I was still doing me things. I was also outside of me, looking on, criticizing myself. Jan took it well—the arrogance, the self-confidence. She knew something was wrong, but she knew it was me too, I think. I’d never been so sure of myself, never been so reckless. We got married then. A spur of the moment thing, surprised everybody, but I think Jan had really wanted it. She loved me, she’d waited…maybe she’d been waiting a long time, for me to propose.”

“The thing is though, the break, I wasn’t really as confident as I projected. I was still me. All those little insecurities, blossoming in my skull. I wasn’t getting better, the stress was building up, because I had this whole new…new self I was trying to sell everyone on, and I was still just fucking up, you can’t just put on a new set of clothes and call yourself by a new name and become someone else, and everyone else, I don’t know if they knew but I knew, and Jan came to me…”

Hank felt the hot tears behind his eyes and blinked them back.

“It was a bad moment. I was out of control, I knew it then. She came to me in the middle of my work, just walking sex, worried about me, wanted me to stop, and I…I just lashed out at her. Verbally. Physically.”

He held up one meaty hand, gripped in a loose fist. Opened it, to stare at the palms.

“That was years ago. Years. I’ve never…really gotten over it. She forgave me. I couldn’t. I couldn’t really. Other people, when they find out, they treat me like a pariah. Which I deserve, you know. I don’t want to excuse it, anymore. I think I was in denial for a long time. Mad a the world, mad at myself, for what I’d done, how stupid I’d been. People call me a genius, but I was just so…stupid, to do that. The whole thing about being bigger and stronger than someone, you need control. No excuses. Too easy to hurt someone.”

Hank stepped back from the podium, cheeks burning, eyes on the floor as the green ponytail’s pen nub scritched across the paper.

“Thank you Hank,” the psychologist said, looking around. “Who would like to share next?”

###

Not in My Father's House

Not in My Father’s House
by
Bobby Derie

There was a hock swimming in the black-eyed peas, another in the pot with the greens, and bacon grease sizzled as the corn pone rose in the pan. His name was Luke, like the apostle, and hers was Soofa, though even her husband called her Mamie. We had met on the road that Sunday morning, and they fetched me up on their way to church, for I had been out of the sight of God for a long time, and brought me back to their house when the minister had thumped his Bible down ‘til I thought the good book or the pulpit would crack. We had met all their children, save one, and they sat me down to an honest dinner.

Luke had bought their freedom with his toil—not a farmer or a sharecropper, though he had picked his share of cotton in his younger days, and had the hands to show for it—and this house and land. There was only one picture in that house, a faded daguerreotype over the doorway, framed in a horseshoe, which showed a much younger Luke and Mamie, with a gangly boy that must have been a man by now.

“Who is that?” I asked, and all eyes fell south, save Luke, who stared straight ahead, and Mamie, who looked at that dark face.

“We do not talk of him in this house.” From the tone of Luke’s answer I knew the dinner had ended, and I knew better than to apologize.

Luke offered me the night in the house, but I had already felt my welcome worn, and the night was fine and dry, so I said as I should put a few miles down before the stars came out. The freeman offered to walk with me as far as the crossroads, and so we set off as Mamie commanded her kitchen once again. Luke did not speak ‘til we were down the road a piece, and the trees along the crick shielded us from the gaze from the little kitchen window.

“His name was Christopher, and he was my son.” Luke began, and I brought forth my tobacco and cob, and he his, and said nothing more as we filled our pipes and sparked them. “Our eldest, the first to survive the crib, the last to feel the manacle and the lash. I thought the devil was in him as a boy, but how wrong I was.”

We smoked and walked, and the sky was streaks of crème and rose as the burning circle hung above fast brown waters and hid itself behind the tops of trees.

“I had given him the money to buy his freedom. But there was a place and time for forbidden things, and he had all the sin and pride of youth, so he sat down at that table, elbow to elbow with white men and black who should have known better, and he cut the deck as Mephistopheles himself dealt the cards.” He puffed on the cob, and the coal burned in the twilight. “One by one they lost, and died, but the boy had some skill and some luck and arrogance to match the devil, and as the dawn came on it was just him and Satan playing one last hand of stud. I don’t know what stakes my boy put down—he must have won a good bit, to still be playing—but when the time came he bet it all, and to match him Old Nick brought forth the deed to a plot in Hell, and dropped it in the kitty.”

We were at the crossroads, and the moon had risen, but it was still light, and the starbugs were out among the tall grass.

“The rest, I think you know.” I nodded at that. There was hardly a man or woman north or south that had not heard of the great Freetown, where any slave was welcome, on the outskirts of Hell—and how the demons carried them thither, hiding them from the gaze of masters and angels, leaving empty, bloodless plantations and hollow quarters. Compared to such conditions, who would not gamble on the pleasures of Hell?

“He did a great thing,” I said at last. “Given ten thousand years, I don’t know that all the slaves could have bought their freedom. Sometimes it has to be won, or given, all at a go.”

“I am not wise enough to weigh such things,” Luke said. “But I saw him that morning when he came home, the wrong paper clenched in his hand, and I knew what he had done, and become. I barred the door and forbid him from my house. I didn’t want Mamie to see him that way, eaten all up by his sins.”

I gave him my hand then, and he took it in his own, old calluses worn soft at the edges, puckered with small scars. We parted at the crossroads and I walked until Sunday night became Monday morning, and thought long on fathers and sons and sins and the lonely beauty of the night. Then I crossed a rickety log bridge, and saw the rotted hemp hanging from the old tree, and I was in Alabama once again.

###